Opinions on Coral Draw v Adobe CS

[Glenn Sharp]

My first experience with computer aided design was around 1990…..we produced vectored drawings in DesignCad and ‘coloured them in’ in Photopaint….It was a right headache. We then started to use Corel (4 I think) and life became much, much easier.

I’ve stuck with Corel ever since and as much as I liked the earlier version of Signlab, Corels updates seemed to provide pretty much everything we wanted.

Even though there have been a few updates since I have stuck with corel 12. Our core business is Estate Agent signage so everything we design is pretty much spot colours and basic effects….if we were into car wraps and such like, I imagine we would have to look at something else or additional plugins but Corel does everything we need and more in our particular case

It probably depends on Budget and personal preference I suppose

[Karl Williams]

Coral gets the thumbs up from me. Used it since version 7 and never really had any issues. Does most of the things I need it to do. 😉

[David Rowland]

hi, i don’t want to double post, just recently spoke about this here

https://www.uksignboards.com/viewtopic.p … tor#394877

[Colin Aburrow]

Karl, Dave,

What I was really tying to find out is why so many sign makers us Coral Draw and if there was advantages that Coral Draw has that is so different from Adobe CS. There must be a reason so many sign makers use Coral Draw. It seems even sign makers that use Adobe CS also use Coral Draw so if there is no reason for this why do they bother with both.

Colin

[Peter Normington]

It really depends on your own skills, when you say corel v adobe, they both have vector and pixel programs, adobe in my opinion is the industry standard, corel is good, but probably a poor cousin to adobe.
as signmakers, we probably do not use either program to their full potential.
so the best program is the one you are more comfortable with,
and know how to use properly, just having the program, is like having any other tool. but how you use it, is more important.

Peter

[David Rowland]

some signmakers come from Design backgrounds and move into this industry, so these programs are too familar. I for instance came from a silk screen print back industry into this one.

There is also the fact that us older designers/signmakers started off with early version of Corel Draw (mine was v3 and my colleague was v4), this was very cheap to purchase as OEM, my other colleagues where news paper quark xpress layout person and another went to colleage with Adobe Illustrator products.

Before we took over the previous company, the staff were familar with Gerber Composer that Spandex was involved with.

So as you can see, it is really down to the persons skill and how easily it is to make the transition and also with regards what tools are provided to that person. Corel however is not the fastest sign making program out there but it’s tool set is very easy to use with a lot of flexability.

Corel also comes with loads of clipart & fonts where Adobe doesnt, but these days we have online sites to help.

[Colin Aburrow]

Thanks Peter & Dave

I understand what you saying and I will stick to Adobe Illustrator & Photoshop as know how these work. It just seemed that a lot of posts on here seem to refer to Coral and was curious as to why but your comments make a lot if sense as I to came from a screen-printing background and most of that was Illustrator Photoshop & Quark.

Thanks
Colin

[Alan Drury]

Seldom does one programme do everything required. I use Signlab and Corel and I feel pretty well covered but the same would apply to Illustrator and Corel. illustrator will do somethings better than corel and vice versa, I’m a Corel man and not a fan of Illustrator but as Dave said it depends on what you are used to.
Alan D