When you're just starting out, Corel is a very attractive package. It's one of the first programs I learned. I find that a lot more people around here use it than I expected. Corel Draw is very intuitive, and very powerful in general, and dirt cheap compared to the competition Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. Corel Suite comes with Draw and Photopaint. A lot of Corel users absolutely detest Illustrator because once you've used something so smart an intuitive as Draw, you can't comprehend how Illustrator can be so unintuitive. Recent versions of Adobe products have stolen enough from Corel to improve on this somewhat, but Draw is still much more intuitive. I used to be one of those people who hated Illustrator. LOL
Draw is competitor to Illustrator and Photopaint is a photo editing app like Photoshop. There are a couple other things in the box and it all costs considerably less than the cost of just Illustrator! You'll be on your way quickly to making art in Corel Draw because of it's intuitiveness. But as a professional, I would quickly advise you to spend the extra money and take the Adobe route. I feel very strongly about it's superiority, both Illustrator and Photoshop. When you get down to the nitty gritty of total flexibility of manipulating art, and making things print, Illustrator, in all of it's unglorious untuitiveness, begins to shine brightly and Draw begins to pale. Photoshop simply has no equal. Nothing else to be said about Photoshop except, I can't say enough good things about it. I still wouldn't call it intuitive, but otherwise, it's a monster of a powerful program. It's amazingly stable, predictable, and WYSIWYG.
I hope I haven't made your decision more difficult.
