New Business advice

[Brian Hays]

You can buy a very basic Signlab which you can use purely to cut from. You design in Illustrator, Corel Draw etc then export it ready to cut.

It costs £185, you should be able to get that money back if you decide to upgrade to a better version of Signlab in the future….

[Graeme Speirs]

thats similar to what I use ie: corel design then cut via a programme called co cut, it serves what I need to do, but from reading on here the best route would be signlab. I got my cocut packaged with my omega cutter from signwizard, total cost was around £1400 which I reckon is great deal as the cutter has been great and no probs with software.

This suited me tho as I am competent with corel, I suppose it depends on where your at, if starting out then signlab was prob be the best but you may be good with corel or illustrator.

hunt around on some auctions sites and you might pick up an older version of signlab.

good luck with new venture.

[Brian Hays]

Think you will find 99% of Signlab programs offered for sale on auction sites are cracked copies 🙄

[magpie]

I’m still using the illustrator plug-in (mac version) that came on the cd with my graphtec to cut my designs. I haven’t used other sign software and so can’t compare. That said, its done everything I’ve asked of it, including automatic tiling.

All the best, Pete.

[Alan Drury]

For those using Corel, there are some excellent scripts at http://www.oberonplace.com which would help with tiling etc if your plugin did not support it. Sounds like the basic signlab Brian describes would be a good bet if starting out.
Alan

[PhilB]

Thanks for all the replies guys. I think I will stick with Illustrator and get the Signlab cutting software.

PhilB

[John Childs]

Good choice. I’ve used Illustrator for sixteen years now and whilst I have no doubt that there are programmes with more features out there, I have never felt the need to pay for them.

The Signlab cutting thingie sounds interesting though. I don’t suppose that there is a Mac version, is there Brian?

[Brian Hays]

Signlab is PC only, always will be as 99% of computers are PC’s.

Flexi do a basic cutting package for the Mac, think that is around £200 as well?

[John Childs]

Wrong Brian. It’s 97%. 😀

Anyway, Macs are much more prevalent than that in the design and graphics industry.

I tried the Flexi one but found it was far too complicated for what it did and binned it after a fortnight.

We currently use Cutline from http://www.illom.se It’s a brilliant bit of kit but it’s OS9 only so we will need a re-think in advance of when our iMacs come to the end of their lives.

Regards – John

[magpie]

John, I had a quick look at the site you mentioned. The plug-in supplied with the graphtec plotter does more or less the same bar the nesting and editable weed lines. Which is easy enough to do manually in illustrator anyway.

Cheers Pete

Ps Don’t know if it supports other plotters though

[John Childs]

Pete,

We don’t use the editable weed lines anyway. 😀

The reason we use a stand-alone programme is that we don’t use the same computers for cutting as we do for designing.

It’s different if you are doing all the work yourself on one computer but I wanted a programme that was easy to teach sometimes less than bright operators to use and consequently be productive more quickly. Also, the easier a programme is to use the fewer mistakes get made.

[Brian Hays]

Sorry John 97% 😳

We have sold a few of the flexi cutting programs I thought they were ok?

I know a lot of designers etc use Macs, think a very very high perecentage of Sign Makers are PC though. There would be very very few if it wasn’t for Flexi on the Mac…