We use SignLab, a Cadlink product. It has a very user friendly work space- alot like Corel. We've been using it for over 15 years, and we love it. We also use Adobe PS for other designing.
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What software are you using for Sigange Designing?
- Thread starter Jenefer_h
- Start date
DL Signs
Never go against the family
Have an Illustrator license, use it occasionally, but for most of my design work I use Affinity (suite V2.xx). Affinity is just so streamlined, not as bloated or buggy as Adobe, it's super efficient for production work. For renderings, engineer & electrical drawings I use ActCad, occasionally Blender... I'll use whatever I need to, but like to focus on best bang for the buck, like Affinity & ActCad, neither is subscription based, Blender is free.
chester215
Just call me Chester.
Hmmm, it won't let me edit my original post.
But anyway, Flexi seems to me to be very intuitive.
I have tried Onyx and signlab also but didn't like them as much.
RachelKelly
Just your bright haired sign designer.
Working in an older sign shop, I'm the only designer using Illustrator and Photoshop for my renders and layouts for proof specs. Then we use Gerber's Omega Composer for flat cut and routed layouts. The other designer swears by Corel Draw and it's photo manipulation program. I'm trying to get into 3D representations for isometric renders in the web based Sketch-Up, but trying to make a building in there look similar enough to the client's is kicking my butt. I'm not committed to buying a licenses for any 3D software until I learn enough to atleast show a channel letter or illuminated cabinet on a building.
Elwood "Woody" Smith
New Member
Adobe Creative Suite design & pre press. i have been in marketing/design/printing for over 35 years and it has been the most used for the past 25. Corel seem to be used allot by sign shops. Which was a surprise to me, becuase no one in marketing or design has used it for 20 yrs. But if it works, go for it. Are there others of course there are. Use what your familiar with as long as it can output high resolution or vector art as pdf you will be golden. People get hung up on how you make it. I'm no a big fan of Canva, but I think it is user knowledge on setting up the files and not the Pro version's fault.
RachelKelly said:
This is just my opinion, but unless the sign project is worth a lot of money and the design of the sign is unusual in some kind of sculptural way, it's going to be a big waste of time and effort creating a model of a building on which the sign is installed in full-blown 3D.
Just about all the sketches I see from other sign companies and other firms creating sign designs just create 2D views. They'll either super-impose the sign design on a photo of the building. Or they'll use CAD-like 2D views of building elevations.
I often go the latter route. I'll sometimes work from CAD files provided by the customer to create better looking color versions of the building elevation (with closed shapes). Sometimes I have to create the building elevation art from survey measurements of the buildings. I think it's pretty clunky to merely plop imagery of signs on top of building photos. The images are never going to be accurate to scale due to optical effects of perspective. Plus embedded photos can inflate the crud out of file sizes. I'll go with the photo method if something has to be done quick and dirty.
Elwood Woody Smith said:
I've been using CorelDRAW and Illustrator side by side since the early 1990's. They both have their strengths and weaknesses as well as specific pitfalls for moving certain kinds of artwork from one app to the other.
CorelDRAW is very good for sign design tasks. It's tools, certain keyboard shortcuts and other features make it work very well for technical drawing tasks. One specific example is its shortcuts for aligning and distributing objects: R-L-T-B-C-E keys, add shift to distribute. Illustrator has nothing like that. And I haven't been able to create any similar custom keyboard shortcuts like that in Illustrator either. Not only do I have to open the Align panel in Illustrator to align/distribute anything, but I also have to press an extra click to make one object stay in place for others to align to it. CorelDRAW can also align text objects to other objects via their baselines. I've been begging Adobe to add that to Illustrator for some time.
I can't live without Illustrator for other tasks. Illustrator's pen tool is vastly superior to the one in CorelDRAW. The keyboard shortcuts associated with its pen tool as well as shortcuts for zooming in/out and hand-panning the view make it far easier/faster to do things like hand digitize clean vectors over other artwork. Illustrator's CPU/GPU preview provides a much smoother appearance when using features like animated zoom or hand-panning the view. The zoom/pan views in CorelDRAW are more herky-jerky.
Illustrator has far superior integration with Photoshop. CorelDRAW cannot paste AICB vector paths or shape layers into Photoshop.
A great deal of corporate artwork is generated in Illustrator. Just today I had to so something involving the UPS full color vector logo. That thing does not work at all in CorelDRAW due to all the gradient mesh effects in the logo. Other Illustrator-related effects won't translate to CorelDRAW. Free-form gradient fills aren't compatible. Most art brush and pattern brush effects have to be expanded before sending to CorelDRAW. Certain kinds of transparency and masking modes on artwork won't translate right. Whenever I receive AI, EPS or PDF art files from clients, especially larger corporate ones, I'll open the files in Illustrator to see what's going on with the artwork before attempting to port it over to CorelDRAW for more technical-oriented design work.
I can go on and on with more examples of each application's pros and cons. I just try to use the best of both applications for getting my work done.
Last edited:
veronicalee2024
New Member
For signage design, most professionals use Adobe Creative Suite, particularly Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop for creating vector graphics and manipulating images, alongside InDesign for layout and text formatting, allowing for high-quality designs suitable for various signage formats.
Digital Signage Software like Yodeck, ScreenCloud, NoviSign:
These platforms allow for creating and managing dynamic digital signage content, including scheduling and remote updates across multiple screen
Digital Signage Software like Yodeck, ScreenCloud, NoviSign:
These platforms allow for creating and managing dynamic digital signage content, including scheduling and remote updates across multiple screen
Eforcer
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RachelKelly
Just your bright haired sign designer.
Ha! I feel you there! That's how the last employer was. Get the proof out and worry about the build and configure details later... Glad that's in the past.
Boudica
I'm here for Educational Purposes
Incorrect. Professionals do not use InDesign to design signs. If they are using the creative suite they use Illustrator for large and grand format layouts. InDesign is NOT for large format layouts.
Scotchbrite
No comment
Started with CASmate. Biggest thing I remember from using that program was trying to come up with file names that were only 8 characters long but still descriptive enough to figure out what was what.
Eventually ended up with Flexi for most of my work.
Also use Photoshop for a fair bit of work and Illustrator for a few things.
Eventually ended up with Flexi for most of my work.
Also use Photoshop for a fair bit of work and Illustrator for a few things.
Scotchbrite said:
I dealt with the DOS-oriented 8-dot-3 file naming scheme by creating a file numbering system. I kept separate Notepad files adding descriptions for the file numbers. Once Windows95 was released and long file names arrived I didn't need those separate text files anymore. The CASmate files were still limited to 8 characters. But I had companion sketch files, usually in CorelDRAW CDR format, that used the same sketch number as a prefix to a longer file name. I'm still using that naming system today.
We did switch our CASmate dongles over to Flexi near the end of the 1990's. One reason: CASmate wouldn't run on a PC with Win98 second edition or later. I found out about this the hard way when I got a new Dell PC that had Win98SE installed. The transition to Flexi was fairly smooth. Flexi could open CASmate SCV files.
Even back then I was already doing a fair amount of design work using CorelDRAW, Adobe Illustrator and even Macromedia Freehand (when Illustrator was ignoring the Windows platform). Getting into the early 2000's I decided I didn't need that Flexi key on my computer. I made better use of it by putting it on another production computer.
myront
Dammit, make it faster!!
Corel is my choice but I have slowly been setting up illustrator's workspace to be more like Corel's.
I can now zoom with the mouse wheel
Alignment shortcuts are now the same L (left), R(right), etc. They still don't work properly though.
Sucks you have to use scripts or actions to do the tasks that Corel has already built in. I hade to make an action to place a rectangle around the artboard. In Corel you just double-click the rectangle tool or select a shape hold ctrl and double-click the rectangle tool to create a rectangle around your selection.
I've created some "actions" but another fail for illustrator is that you can't assign any keyboard shortcut you want, you can only use the "F" keys. You can't add an icon on the toolbars and such for quick access like you can in Corel.
Illy doesn't show details of what you have selected i.e. is it a raster image and whether it's rgb or cmyk. Select all doesn't tell you how many shapes you have selected.
RachelKelly
Just your bright haired sign designer.
I honestly love InDesign specifically for menu panels. Coffee shops, little snack shacks, and soda fountain drive ups.
You can create a single page document in a scale proportion to your final size, set your columns, use tabs features to align to a ($) or (.) characters. Then you can add leader character like the ( . . . )s. And Importing a list from excel with the customer's pricing is SOOOO much easier than copy and pasting it into Illustrator. InDesigns grid system is so beneficial for hybrid text and picture menus too. Everything comes out perfectly aligned everytime.
Then once I've got that layout all done. I save it as PDF, Import it into Illustrator with text converted to outlines and finish the graphic components, backgrounds and layout adjustments for mounting hardware and such.