Different approach to design

[myront]

I do all wrap designs with Coreldraw and at full scale. Rarely are any of the files over 300MB. SInce I am the soul designer in a very busy sign shop the boss had asked one of our production members to design a "half wrap". He has extensive experience but only in illustrator. Doesn't matter to me but I better be able to pick it up and run with it, in any capacity, if and when needed. That time has come.
A year later and the customer needs to change the name on the wrap. We explain the cheap way would be to do patches to cover the old name. Good "can I see a proof"? Sure, get right on it
I find the directory where his file/s are located. 28 items totaling 2.8GB! Nowhere within these is a complete layout. 3 different ai files at 950MB! various photoshop images, png's, pdf's WHAT A FRICKIN' MESS.
Short story...I grabbed what I needed, changed as needed and had the proof ready within 2hrs
1 file 16.8MB
I doubt the colors are even going to match.

 

[Johnny Best]

Your my Coreldraw hero!

 

[Reveal1]

What you are describing is not only a design problem, but a business problem. As an owner of a small business with one FT designer and one PT, I'm a stickler for file organization. Not being a designer, I have a basic rule and that's that I or a production person should be able to make simple changes to any file with a minimum of fuss. After all, even the most stable employees will eventually take vacation, get ill, move on or retire and the next person needs to be able to step in.

 

[shoresigns]

This isn't a Corel vs Illustrator problem. Tell your designer to quit saving AI files with PDF data, then you'll rarely see an AI file larger than a few megabytes.

 

[myront]

This actually isn't the only person I've seen come through here that does this. The common denominator seems to be Adobe users. I've been with this company 16years and have seen 6-8 other designers come and go for various reasons. All of them Adobe trained.

 

[CanuckSigns]

Yes, as a corel user the whole concept of linked files confuses me, I know it was originally done to save disk space, but it's 2020, HDD space is cheap!

 

[myront]

 

[WildWestDesigns]

There is something else going on. Saving PDF compatibility very well could be one (it does have some pros, but that's obscene file size).

Getting wild with meshes and untoward amount of nodes?

Putting in ultra high resolution raster elements?

 

[Johnny Best]

myront is a appist, a person who shows or feels discrimination or prejudice against people who use other apps and believes that a particular app is superior to another.

 

[Reveal1]

myront is a appist, a person who shows or feels discrimination or prejudice against people who use other apps and believes that a particular app is superior to another.

So what does that make a person who feels Apple products are superior to any other; an appleist?

 

[Reveal1]

We use AI for Design files, export PDF for print files, for 1000+ customers and tens of thousands of jobs with design files, quotes, images etc. on an uncompressed 3TB drive array. Also have a process to archive older files on (as Canuck stated) cheap storage.

Regardless, to me it more important to be able to organize and find everything and have consistent design process.

 

[myront]

We use AI for Design files..."
.

Yes, 1 folder containing 1 ai. file. No need for anything else.
That ai file should hold all the images needed (both side views, back, etc., all design elements whether used in the final or or not. I see no need to have everything separated into multiple files And, for God's sake, quit with all the damn layers. Another common, yet totally unnecessary, practice is to take the image of a vehicle into photoshop and "resample" to full scale AND 150dpi then start designing on that. If it starts at 30" and 72dpi leave it at that. Don't care that it says 15dpi when scaled 5x the size.

 

[shoresigns]

Yes, 1 folder containing 1 ai. file. No need for anything else.
That ai file should hold all the images needed (both side views, back, etc., all design elements whether used in the final or or not. I see no need to have everything separated into multiple files.

If you're embedding files rather than linking them in Illustrator, you're doing it wrong. Have you forgotten your original post? Embedding instead of linking is exactly how you get the enormous files you were complaining about at the start of the thread. That, and PDF data, which embeds extra copies of all files including your linked ones.

 

[Bobby H]

Linking placed images in Illustrator is usually better than embedding. But the downside is the user needs to be organized at naming files and folders. A lot of people are just lazy about that. And that goes regardless of computing platform.

Sometimes embedding all assets can be easier if that file is going to be moved from one workstation to another or uploaded to another site.

This isn't a Corel vs Illustrator problem. Tell your designer to quit saving AI files with PDF data, then you'll rarely see an AI file larger than a few megabytes.

Adobe Illustrator usually has the PDF compatibility thing checked "on" by default. That can inflate file sizes to some degree.

One of the big things is the document raster effects settings. If someone is designing the side of a vehicle in Illustrator at full size, but has the raster effects setting at the default of 300ppi, various kinds of fill and effects will dramatically balloon file sizes. I'm not really a big fan of using Photoshop-like effects (like drop shadows) within Illustrator. I'll use Photoshop to create elements like that and then place them in Illustrator. Or I'll just do the whole thing in Photoshop.

This actually isn't the only person I've seen come through here that does this. The common denominator seems to be Adobe users. I've been with this company 16years and have seen 6-8 other designers come and go for various reasons. All of them Adobe trained.

Adobe trained? These days it seems like most people doing design work in the sign industry are self-taught. The bigger issue is people just rolling along with no default settings changed.

Another common, yet totally unnecessary, practice is to take the image of a vehicle into photoshop and "resample" to full scale AND 150dpi then start designing on that. If it starts at 30" and 72dpi leave it at that. Don't care that it says 15dpi when scaled 5x the size.

Yeah, I can't stand it when people "up-rez" images. It doesn't create any new, real detail like the lies Hollywood tells in movies and TV shows with the "enhance this image" cliché. And it just bogs down a computer when the image is just a reference image for work purposes.

 

[myront]

Corel has the option to link images but never use it. Absolutely no need to. Creates more headache than it's worth. I use raster effects from Photopaint. I keep a vector copy behind any raster for cutting i.e. beveled text and such.

ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS TO DESIGN WRAPS SOLELY IN PHOTOSHOP!

Used to get files like that a lot from designers who worked here. When I asked where or how to get a cut line they hadn't a clue.

 

[Bobby H]

ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS TO DESIGN WRAPS SOLELY IN PHOTOSHOP!

I don't take a blanket approach to designing vehicle wraps or anything big involving large format digital printed output. It all comes down to the nature of what's in the image. I've done plenty of vehicle graphics jobs entirely within CorelDRAW. I've done others where the finished layout was an Illustrator file featuring a mix of vector art and raster elements brought in from Photoshop. Then there's others I've done where the finished image is a big Photoshop file, but features a bunch of paths brought in via Illustrator -with a good amount of that path work beginning in CorelDRAW. The paths were then used to create precise selections.

Regardless of how the design is produced and the file format of the final product, the process I use is pretty organized. Several co-workers have to access my files for various stages of sign production. Unfortunately there are others doing design work that take a Messy Marvin approach to everything.