There seem to be some design gurus on here, so I thought I’d ask…

Can anyone recommend an entry level piece of design software that I could use to knock up some basic logo type designs at home. I’d love to get adobe illustrator, but it would be wasted on me.

Is CorelDRAW any good?

Thank you.

CorelDraw will do the job but you really should get Adobe Illustrator.

The best (free) drawing package I’ve used in a long old time is Paint.Net.

The other big free one is Gimp, but I never got on with it myself. Whether these are quite what you’re looking for though, I’m not wholly sure. They’re more Photoshop than Illustrator.

Thanks guys.

mf, I assume that illustrator is THE package then…

Hmmm, decisions. Just gotta try and find a way to justify the £.

If it’s a hobby or a few one off’s use corel draw, it’ll do the job for what you describe and will be able to output pretty much whatever format you need. I used to work in a company that exclusively used corel draw for commercial work which is very unusual but it was ok.

If it was your work then I’d go with Adobe Illustrator, it’s not perfect but it is as close to an industry standard as you are likely to find.

can i just say I work in the print business and although Corel is good for a user, on our side it has an appalling reputation for problems with output

we avoid it wherever we can, although if you are supplying print ready PDFs it should be OK

inkscape

oooh, inkscape looks interesting. Quite an appealing price too!
Do you use it?

mW it is just for a hobby, hence not wanting to spend loads on illustrator and only use 5% of the functionality. Thanks for the info.

i have done, very competent piece of software, and for free you can’t go wrong.

Check out the Serif stuff too – DrawPlus and Photoplus. Serif were flogging the previous versiopn of Photoplus for a tenner lest week.

mf, I assume that illustrator is THE package then…

It is the most comprehensive and the most widely-used in the graphics industry yes – there isn’t a great deal it can’t do. I have been using it for years and years and still probably only know about 10% of its capabilities but it does everything I ever need – create logos, draw maps, devise charts etc.

+1 get illy.

Freehand? what’s happened to that, I used to prefer it to illustrator.

Interesting enough there’s a really cheap app for the iPad I’ve been messing with, iDraw, got myself a cheap (£14.50) stylus, since I still get on better in the early stages of messing with logos with a pencil and paper.

Adobe gobbled it up when they bought macromedia, Never used it myself mind so don’t miss it.

I still use Freehand from time to time! I find it a lot faster to use for certain jobs than Illustrator.

CorelDraw is certainly a good value vector package and will be more than enough for hobby use.

get a 30 day trial

Trial is the way to go, while your at it give the Autodesk apps a try, they do a great vector drawing package called SketchBook Designer and a non vector SketchBook Pro/Express, these are particularly good if you use a wacom tablet.

Pen and paper are the best route if you just want to design at home though, very cheap.