Corel Designer, Why is it not more popular, What am I missing

[unclebun]

It has been bugging me that I wasn't familiar with Corel Designer, despite having been in the sign industry for 26 years. So I looked at Corel's website to see what it was. They don't make it any more. But I did find this page that explains what it was. It was Micrografx Designer, and Corel bought it way long ago. But now Corel Designer has been discontinued, but if you want all of its features, they are now available in Corel Draw Technical Suite. The primary feature that distinguishes it is the 3D design feature, and that it is meant to interface with the industries that use technical drawings. https://www.coreldraw.com/en/pages/old-brands/corel-designer/

That said, for sign and vehicle graphics, that ability is overkill. The graphics we make are 2 dimensional, by and large, and even if we are doing dimensional signs, we usually don't need to make technical drawings for them. So there is no need to pay $1000 for that ability.

The regular version of Corel Draw is perfectly capable of doing your graphics design for vehicles. We do it all the time, using the same 1:20 vehicle templates you are using. You have two choices of how to create your layout in Corel Draw with these templates. You can either make your drawing a scale drawing, using the scale selection I mentioned earlier, or you can make your layout 1:1 and scale the template up after you import it to the layout. Corel Draw is perfectly capable of handling a layout at 1:1 scale for a vehicle, and there is no advantage to working at scale.

Corel Draw can also make your dimensional callouts very easily. There is nothing difficult about it. Many times we call something difficult because we are unfamiliar with where the tools are. But the tools are there, they aren't hard to find, and they are easy to use. In the old days you got a thick manual with which you could look up all the functions. Unfortunately you now have to use online/onscreen help, and though the information is there, unless you have a multimonitor setup it's clumsy to go between the help and the program to learn something.

 

[Texas_Signmaker]

Interesting read... neat to see how software and the sign industry evolved.

I use Flexi 95% of the time... Been using it since I started in 2004 and am too comfortable to start over on anything else. I started using Illustrator more recently but only where Flexi falls short when importing other peoples files.

I had to LOL at the "MAC's processors are built for designing"... I think we've all heard that over the years. Sooo stupid. I feel like people that are not inherently good with technology are drawn to Macs. Like the more "technical minded" you are, the more likely you're using Windows.

Mac look cool and all, but I never can seem to bring myself to sacrifice double or triple my money for something that is half as good.

 

[Jim Hill]

This is a very informative thread and even though I have been using Corel for years I learned some new things I did not know.
I happen to really like using Corel for the type of work that I do but my son uses AI for the type of work he does.

I would agree that many people in the sign industry use both Corel and AI and love them both.

Jim

 

[kcollinsdesign]

Seeing as though this has evolved into a Mac vs. PC thing, I will offer my two cents:

PC and Windows operating systems are widely marketed and flexible. Because they command a 90% of the market, almost all software companies will be sure that their program operates in that environment. There are far more controls and easier access to the interface than Macs, allowing for high levels of interface customization. Also software developers are not faced with programming and GUI conventions that Apple demands for their trademark user experience.

Macs are only a small part of Apple's business, and a very small part of the computer market. They appeal to a vanity market because they are expensive and look sleek. But they also appeal to certain professional users because of subtle interface features and a more streamlined GUI across programs. Many professional users understand the inherent elegance and simplicity of operating a Mac, and are not bothered that they have to pay more because they know that their productivity (across all daily uses) will be improved and their screen time will be more pleasant and somewhat reduced.

If you value flexibility and cheapness, or if your software demands it, get a PC. If you like writing your own programs and digging into the operating system and bios, get a PC. If you are a gamer or just want the most powerful processor available under your hood, get a PC (and plenty of fans).

If your software needs are addressed by Mac, and you have reached a level where your time, and the quality of your time, is worth more than saving a few dollars, I would highly recommend taking a Mac out for a spin.

Note: I use both Macs and PCs. The PCs run my CAM equipment and, until recently, Corel Draw and Painter. In the past I have had employees who prefer Windows or Linux. AutoCAD runs on a PC. I use Macs for personal computing (writing, emails, chat, social media, music, etc.) and for the bulk of my design work (Adobe CC). I use iCloud for backup (along with Time Machine), iPhone, iPad, MacTV; the whole Apple user experience is fluid and convenient. I don't have to think about it; it just works.

 

[Recelect]

It sounds like you would prefer Corel for many reasons. I say it's your show and do it the way you feel is best for you and not to suit someone else. If they are decent, they will figure it out.

I do prefer it, but only because I have been pigeon-holed in it forever. I don't want to be the guy that is just used to a certain software and can't progress because of it. After all the posts, Now I just wonder if there is other ways to dimension a project with software that does not have the ability. Most of my work will be fleets that MUST be exactly the same, year to year. My artwork has to match each batch, and the only way I see to legitimately do that is by ensuring the graphics are scaled correctly, and dimensioned to the vehicle off of set body lines. That way I know they will be printed, cut, and installed correctly. I legitimately do not understand how handwritten notes on install sheets, kept in a 3 ring binder, are still a thing. (which is what our current sub contractors do, 3 different graphics companies) they take this binder out, and find last years pages which is just dimension lines on where something goes. I
Thankyou!

I had always found this ironic.

To the OP:

I noticed that you said "in house" with regard to what your producing. Is everything in regard to this "in house"? Not receiving outside files, not sending out files to the outside?

If there is no reason to be concerned what outside users may need (for whatever reason), then I would get what your designer could use efficiently to deliver the best product. Doesn't matter if it's Ai, DRAW or something else.

It matters mainly because we will be getting artwork from outside customers, such as logos, and badges. I honestly think my thought on how to put this together will work just fine, I just don't want to go against the grain cause I think i know everything!

Thankyou!

"Back in the day, one needed a college degree and years of experience to be a graphic designer. Type was produced by speciality type setting firms, and images were separated and sized using cameras and film. Layouts (or mechanicals) were prepared by experienced "paste-up" artists, and printing plates were photographed and created by highly skilled pre-press technicians. These days, anybody can be a graphic designer for a few hundred dollars, and most of the highly skilled technical jobs are gone. I could wax on about the loss of design quality when the process was democratized, but this is where we are, for better or for worse."


We had a "camera room" , "developing room" and a couple other separate dedicated areas for proofing & layouts, pre-press etc.
It used to be a skilled trade like mentioned above to be able to set type and do camera work for enlarging and reducing images / type.
One of the cameras we had was 12-14' long IIRC and doing artwork was a mixture of hand drawn elements and hand set type all trimmed and set out by hand, film positives, wax machines and rubylith oh my...lol.

Sorry for the side track, this just brought back some memories.

I would love to see this process first hand just to see where this industry came from! Most I ever did was develop photos in a photo lab! and about a year later, digital printing started to become a thing. Bye Bye Kodak... (I worked in a Kodak plant in college and started seeing it get tore down, it was super sad.)

It has been bugging me that I wasn't familiar with Corel Designer, despite having been in the sign industry for 26 years. So I looked at Corel's website to see what it was. They don't make it any more. But I did find this page that explains what it was. It was Micrografx Designer, and Corel bought it way long ago. But now Corel Designer has been discontinued, but if you want all of its features, they are now available in Corel Draw Technical Suite. The primary feature that distinguishes it is the 3D design feature, and that it is meant to interface with the industries that use technical drawings. https://www.coreldraw.com/en/pages/old-brands/corel-designer/

That said, for sign and vehicle graphics, that ability is overkill. The graphics we make are 2 dimensional, by and large, and even if we are doing dimensional signs, we usually don't need to make technical drawings for them. So there is no need to pay $1000 for that ability.

The regular version of Corel Draw is perfectly capable of doing your graphics design for vehicles. We do it all the time, using the same 1:20 vehicle templates you are using. You have two choices of how to create your layout in Corel Draw with these templates. You can either make your drawing a scale drawing, using the scale selection I mentioned earlier, or you can make your layout 1:1 and scale the template up after you import it to the layout. Corel Draw is perfectly capable of handling a layout at 1:1 scale for a vehicle, and there is no advantage to working at scale.

Corel Draw can also make your dimensional callouts very easily. There is nothing difficult about it. Many times we call something difficult because we are unfamiliar with where the tools are. But the tools are there, they aren't hard to find, and they are easy to use. In the old days you got a thick manual with which you could look up all the functions. Unfortunately you now have to use online/onscreen help, and though the information is there, unless you have a multimonitor setup it's clumsy to go between the help and the program to learn something.

I subscribe to the Technical Suite Series and it includes Designer, Which I use everyday, all day for Harness diagramming and install manuals for products out of our metal shop. I am extremely familiar with it and for the most part Love it. (vs7 crashed all the time, but it is on v9 now which has been much more reliable) . The difference I have seen in Draw and Designer is just workspace area. The Workspace in technical suite is Far better laid out for technical illustration., which I gravitate towards even for graphic layout design. It actually kinda sucks for 3d drawing, but it is supposed to interface with our Autodesk Fusion 360 program, however we have not really pushed down that path yet. I don't find Draw to be Difficult, I only find it to be more difficult to find the tools that Designer has right on the workspace. I can set up draw to be almost identical to Designer, but I just choose to use designer so I don't have too. Now the question is, does Draw do something Designer doesn't? They seem to be nearly identical in capability. (although some keyboard shortcuts are different between the 2 which is annoying...)


Thanks for everyone's input!

 

[kcollinsdesign]

Okay, I'm sorry if this pisses anyone off, it's not directed at anyone here, most sign peeps who got stuck with Illustrator are cool, but...
My take on why Illustrator isn't as popular outside the sign industry .. and maybe even within....
In the early days Illustrator was Mac based and Corel was PC based, & 100% of people who teach graphic designing (with the exception of Corel & CAD) are
d0uchebags (it's a fact, look it up). These D.B. graphic designer teachers looked down their noses at the common "posers" that used a PC & by extension, Corel Draw.
Many-A-Time I have been on the phone with a designer, when I had to call them up for the 50th time, to remind them to save their art in a format that I can import it into
Corel Draw on my PC and I could hear the disdain in their voice .

I'm sorry for your poor experience. Your dismissal of education may become a detriment to your future career growth. I would recommend a thoughtful evaluation of your capabilities and goals in order to ensure a sustainable career and more fully realized life.

 

[Texas_Signmaker]

I think you "reinforced his point"

 

[kcollinsdesign]

This is so true. Both of my advertising/design teachers was were this way. Our class was all Macs and everything was Adobe/Shockwave and I think a dabble in Quark. Since I grew up in a sign shop (which my parents determined would be PC based) I was fond of PC. Both instructors were hardcore on the Apple train; "it's processor is built better for designing!" I laughed in their face when Apple started using Intel chips because they couldn't use that excuse anymore. They just kept coming up with more. You didn't even want to mention Corel. "I've been teaching this for a decade and no one uses it!" I will also admit that in my 15 years of answering the phones here, I can count on both hands the times someone asked if we support Corel files. So maybe there was some truth to that.

How times have changed! My professors maybe spent one day going over process. They were much more concerned about ideas and communication, and encouraged us to look at the world around us, learn everything we could, and develop our design skills. I learned how to push buttons and flip switches when I got a job.

 

[WildWestDesigns]

It matters mainly because we will be getting artwork from outside customers, such as logos, and badges. I honestly think my thought on how to put this together will work just fine, I just don't want to go against the grain cause I think i know everything!

If that's the case, then get what you need to handle incoming files and stick with that. It doesn't actually have to be the standard choice either, it depends on what specifically y'all have to deal with on a daily basis and what is the most efficient for your business.

As to the platform of choice, in how we all on this forum use computers as it specifically relates to this thread, it doesn't matter if it's Windows, Linux or Mac, they are all PCs in the end. Every last one of them. Each with their own pros and cons (and unfortunately, with their own stereotypes as well) and that's where the real difference is.

Ironically, what is a pro in one instance, might very well be a con in another. However, when fandoms collide.... well, I'm sure we can all guess how that goes.

 

[Big Rice Field]

Ok, so something is bugging me, and I need to know what the industry thinks.

We are installing a Graphics division in my Emergency vehicle business, and hired a graphic designer. I am purchasing all the tools necessary for him to do our own in house work which is roughly 300 vehicles a year. I am a newbie, and I am learning the industry my self, But my designer has been in the industry for 10 years and wanted illustrator for design.

I have found the industry standard for software very much seems to be Illustrator, or Corel Draw... Which Both are fine for artistic work, BUT, I am honestly not terribly fond of for designing vehicle graphics since they don't seem to design in scale...

Which makes me revert back to Corel Designer, which I have used for years to do technical drawings in.

In Corel Designer, Not only can i do artistic work, I can set the workspace up to the scale of the vehicle template. So if the vehicle template is 1:20, I simply set the work space to 1:20 and build the graphics on to it in real scale. This also means I can easily put in dimensions with the dimensioning tool for where a particular badge is located on the car to keep for record. I don't have to size them in flexi, I don't have to manually do math to figure out scale, It is true, Making it extremely easy to design and print, and recreate a year down the road when needed.

So call me dumb, Maybe this is something you all use and don't talk about, OR maybe I suck at the search function, Or, Maybe this can all happen in Illustrator and I just can't find where, or maybe there is a reason NOT to do this, but to me and my technical drawing mind, This seems to be a much easier way to design, scale, and reproduce... AND SO FAR my graphics designer agrees. He had never seen or even heard of Designer until he started here....

So the question is, What makes Illustrator so much better or what am I missing? I hate not designing in scale but mainly because I am so used to doing it with line drawings and sheet metal work... Is there a plugin? or....? Help a newbie understand how you design in illustrator for graphics wraps, and why? OR take a look yourself at designer and see if it works better or why it doesn't.

I want to know the goods and bad from seasoned veterans before we really push down a specific direction.

The photos attached are just showing the dimension tool working for me, and the scale settings...
The dimension tool is literally a tool. drawing in scale lets me use it to locate the badge based on lines of the vehicle. This is surprisingly accurate. You can also see when I select the badge, it gives me its size in the upper right corner... Great for quoting purposes and reproduction!
I hd
Thanks in advance! View attachment 141488 View attachment 141489

Regular orel Draw DOES draw to scale. Both Archiectural and engineering scale, and even metric scale. All Corel Designer adds is more traditional drafting tools. I do recommend it but most designers are clueless about rendering drawings in complicance with AMSE Y14 as they went to design school instead of drafting school. A good sign designer does BOTH. I had one client that required drawings done in Corel Designer and I tried it out. It is a good program but I could not afford a license to run it.

Here is how you set scale in regular Corel Draw

 

[unclebun]

Now the question is, does Draw do something Designer doesn't? They seem to be nearly identical in capability. (although some keyboard shortcuts are different between the 2 which is annoying...)

There are tools in Draw which Designer doesn't do, but since you are not creating content/new designs, you will likely never use them. There are many things Designer has which are totally irrelevant to making signs or vehicle graphics.

Since, by the sound of it, you are primarily creating installation diagrams, it really doesn't matter whether you use Draw or Designer. You'll get the same layout using either application.

Why don't all sign makers use Designer? Its additional features are irrelative to what we do. Therefore the extra cost of purchasing is wasted money.

 

[Andy D]

I'm sorry for your poor experience. Your dismissal of education may become a detriment to your future career growth. I would recommend a thoughtful evaluation of your capabilities and goals in order to ensure a sustainable career and more fully realized life.

LOL, while I experience alot of Mac snobbery in my earlier days, it has seemed to have settled down, my post was 80% tounge in cheek. Thanks for advice, but I'm too old and set in my ways to change now.

 

[Johnny Best]

I sometimes feel like Eustase Tilley.

 

[bannertime]

How times have changed! My professors maybe spent one day going over process. They were much more concerned about ideas and communication, and encouraged us to look at the world around us, learn everything we could, and develop our design skills. I learned how to push buttons and flip switches when I got a job.

The specific class that I mentioned was an internship program where a small group of us would rotate through different marketing firms and such. As a student we already had to have a basic understanding of "design" and the software. I had been using a cracked version of Photoshop 6 for like 5 years. We did a lot of advertising and marketing projects during the first semester to make sure we were good to go in a production environment. Now that I'm thinking about it, one of my projects won a regional marketing category. Sure I still have the stuff for it somewhere. Wasn't able to go to state level though due to some BS from a journalism teacher. Pretty cool opportunity, especially as a high school student.

 

[shoresigns]

Back in the day when I did mechanicals, every bounding box and every printout was 11" x 14", it didn't matter if it was a drawing of a 18" x 24" sign or a strip mall with multiple channel letter signs, the designer would set the scale to fit the drawing every time and
the printouts were to scale every time. Anyone who opened that file or looked at that printout could tell you any dimension in that drawing without having to convert anything... correct me if I'm wrong, but AI can't do that.

Illustrator doesn't have built-in support for working in scale, as we've already established, but there's an easy workaround that also keeps your files nicely organized. You simply draw your drawing at 100% scale, then place it (linked, not embedded) in a new 11"x14" document and rescale it to fit. Write the scale on the document, as you normally would. Done.

The nice thing about that method is you have one file for your original drawing and a separate file for your engineering/architectural template. When you update the original drawing, it updates automatically on your 11"x14" template.

 

[Andy D]

BINGO MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
having come from A COMMERCIAL ART background FOR MANY YEARS into the sign business - i can tell you - you could not be MORE incorrect about illustrator outside of signage - ILLUSTRATOR - IN-DESIGN and PHOTOSHOP are the guts of graphic design - all others are toys! - and i indeed find your language on this site just VERY OFFENSIVE - you have no idea what you are talking about! (NONE) --- maybe you should BE ABLE TO TELL your designers WHAT FORMAT YOU NEED - not ask them to figure it out for you! - IDIOTIC that you do not take the time to ask for the correct format - that is on you- why should any designer have to do your work for you - the distain might be (WHAT AN IDIOT! he doen't even know what he needs back from us)

LMAO! Dude, do you need to lie down and breath into a bag? You must be very intuitive, you read one paragraph of mine and not only were you able to extrapolate
my experience, intelligence, but also my modus operandi of dealing with the thousands of designers over the last 25 years.

I don't want to send you over the edge, but do you mind if we start calling you "CASE IN POINT"?

 

[Andy D]

. I don't think he has any experience in the commercial media industry..

Another intuitive member...
Nope sorry, at one time I was the graphics manager for the prototype division of (at the time) the largest national electrical sign corporation in America.
They had large plants all over America and only did the signage for other large corporations & I had to deal with their retained advertising agencies most days.

 

[myront]

Company hires you with absolutely no experience and pays your way to Design School. There you go thru an 11 week course. Two days are spent with Mac's and illustrator. Rest is color theory, drawing with pencils and crayons etc.. You complete the training and get assigned to mars (don't want to offend anyone) and the first thing they tell is to throw out all that crap. We use PC's and CorelDRAW here!

Best to have both Corel & illy and just use what suits you. But it better be the majority. It's tough to work side by side with designers who all work with different software.If they're out it needs to be easy for someone else to pick up and run. Our shop will be Corel until I retire or die.

 

[Bobby H]

I had all but forgotten about Micrographx Designer. That was among a slew of other applications (such as Deneba Canvas) that competed directly with CorelDRAW in the 1990's. Yeah, Corel eventually bought out Micrographx and, over the long term, killed Designer. At least Corel didn't eliminate it quickly the way Adobe got rid of Freehand. Adobe rubbed it in a little harder by removing the ability to import Freehand .FH files into Illustrator.

This thread has a lot of the usual sweeping generalizations on Corel vs Illustrator, Mac vs Windows and art/design schools.

The CorelDRAW vs Adobe Illustrator debate is pretty tiresome, especially when claims like Illustrator is the only one with art board max size limits. None of the vector drawing programs has truly unlimited art board sizes or unlimited zoom levels. They all have limits. Both CorelDRAW and Illustrator have their pros and cons. Both have their own unique strengths and unique features not found in the rival application. I have long used both apps to take advantage of those unique strengths.

The Mac vs PC thing is also tiresome. One platform's dominance over a certain field in computer graphics has had very little to do with the OS itself. It has always been all about the software applications and hardware that ran on a given platform to serve a given industry, such as newspaper and magazine publishing.

When the desktop publishing revolution got underway with the release of Aldus PageMaker and Adobe's Postscript the classic Mac OS was the lucky recipient of much of that development. Back in the late 1980's thru the mid 1990's print-based publishing offered most of the graphics jobs. Most of the firms ran Macs, but not out of snobbery. Much of it was just a practical reality to get the work done. You couldn't get anything done with early versions of Windows. Not because Windows sucked (as some Mac snobs would say), the software and hardware just wasn't there to run on that OS at the time. After several years the Mac platform get entrenched simply by default, not because one platform was better than the other.

Likewise, ever since the sign industry embraced computer-based tools in the mid 1980's the DOS/Windows platform dominated big time. "CAS" software was a cousin to CAD/CAM/CAE software, which also had the most support in DOS and then Windows. The earliest computer routing tables and vinyl cutters were very proprietary (and harder to use). Has anyone on this forum tried manually programming a vintage Gerber Signmaker IV B (which didn't have a monitor)? Just plugging in different font cartridges and cutting letters out of tractor feed vinyl with sprockets with a humbling experience. Trying to do that now would seem like going back to the 1880's rather than 1990's! Once those early devices interfaced with mainstream desktop computers they did so mostly with DOS & Windows machines, not Macs. The Mac platform drew better support in the late 1990's and early 2000's. But lately software for the sign industry is more Windows dominated than ever. None of the leading CAS applications are available for OSX. All the leading large format RIP applications are Windows-only. I don't think any routing table software (such as EnRoute) works on OSX. Just about all LED message center software runs only on Windows. That all gets back to the CAD roots of sign industry software and where the industry has gone over the past 30 years.

One other thing that gets lost in Mac vs PC debate is all the other industry niches that turned that concept on its head. To me the Mac platform lost a huge amount of its luster when CGI started appearing in movies like The Abyss, Terminator 2 and then Jurassic Park. None of that CG stuff was done on Macs. It was all on really expensive Silicon Graphics computers running the IRIX OS. Linux and Windows NT eventually killed the IRIX OS and put SGI out of business. Meanwhile the classic MacOS didn't support common UNIX features such as support for symmetric multiprocessing, protected memory and preemptive multitasking. WindowsNT did support those features (as did Linux). OSX adopted all those features, but by the time it was released the infrastructure on 3D modeling and animation was already set mostly in stone. Today most movie CG work is done on Windows PCs and churned out via render farms running either Windows or Linux. Apple is releasing that perversely expensive Mac Pro tower with a monitor stand that costs $1000. No one is going to build a render farm on that. Not at that price and not when OSX has no native support for OpenGL. The most powerful high end graphics boards for 3D modeling and animation (made by nVidia) don't run on OSX.

Speaking of which, OpenGL is one thing still living out of the Silicon Graphics legacy. OpenGL's off-shoot into PC gaming is the very thing that threatened the very existence of Apple in the late 1990's. Mac sales went into the toilet for lack of OpenGL support and Apple's insistence of pushing a competing technology no one wanted to adopt. Meanwhile PC sales soared.

As to art school snobbery (and related Mac OS snobbery), it's important to know not all art/design schools are the same. Some offer great quality educations, although some are too damned expensive to justify the cost as well. I would consider any course of study that spends a lot of time describing the feature sets of applications like Photoshop, Illustrator or even CorelDRAW to be a 100% waste of money. Especially today. You only get so much time in the class room. None of that should be spent covering the same crap that can be easily found for free online in videos and web-based tutorials. Art/design schools should spend most of the course time educating students about the brain-related stuff in art, illustration or graphic design and applying those concepts to projects. That's the stuff that will allow a student to focus his talents and become productive and truly employable. None of the software includes any of that critically important stuff. You can get only so far going the self-taught route. Formal education/training at a good school can greatly accelerate that growth. Either way, any real artist has to continually be a student of his craft, looking at the work of others, trying to pick up new skills and having the courage to be self-critical to see where he or she is or isn't growing. Otherwise you just stagnate and eventually kill your sense of creativity.

 

[Johnny Best]

Wow Bobby H, that was a long informative read. Between you and Wild West there now is Signs101 snobbery on software.