Which designing program is better?

I'm going to say Illustrator is better and the next person that comes along will say Corel is better (unless the next person to come along is Robert ) ...

chance said:

I have been wanting to find patterns to help with shading, like lines criss-crossing with white in the middle and other patterns like that. Do either of these programs have a tool that I can already do that?

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Yes, you can create your own pattern swatches in Illustrator and use them as a fill color. It's really easy .... just create your repeating pattern – polka dots, lines, whatever – and drag it to the swatch palette.

personally, i look at it this way...
Illustrator and Corel are in the same "room".... they are both good with vector art (one might be little bit better than the other in some ways..and vice versa...but not much.).

and... photoshop is in another "room" by itself.... very good with raster art.

...atleast you need to know either combination of Illustrator + Photoshop or
Coreldraw + Photoshop....

For vector art Illy and Corel are a toss-up. For raster bitmaps, photoshop is hands down the best.

I use Illustrator, mainly because I come from a commercial art background, and everyone there uses Adobe products. I've got a copy of Corel, but I don't really care for the drawing tools. I think they're kind of cobby, or coarse, as were the ones in Freehand (which was a great program otherwise, but I hated the bezier tool and the knife tool). That said, Corel is cheap and will do the job. I have it so I can open other people's stuff if I need to, but I'd never get rid of Illustrator in favor of Corel. But that's just me. Others hate Illustrator.

I have Corel X3 and Serif Drawplus, I find drawplus easier to work with but admit I do need more practice with Corel. Drawplus was very very cheap and works great. You can get the older versions direct from Serif for $20 or less if you push them. I bought some other programs recently and they gave me 3 months money back trial and threw in Webplus 10 for free with free postage, mine to keep even if i return the other stuff.

I havn't tried Illustrator, but i will give it a go when I've got more time to mess around.

Lee

I use Corel X3 and Illustrator CS2 on a daily basis. Both have their good and bad points, although I think they are both over rated for what they actually do. The Corel gets used extensively with a vinyl cutter as the software also operates as a plugin within Corel.

I also use Photoshop CS2 which is brilliant for image manipulation and there are a plethora of third party plugins for just about every task you could think of.

I also use some specialist image manipulation software to create effects and styles that would be virtually impossible, with the above programs.

DREAMGLASS said:

I use Corel X3 and Illustrator CS2 on a daily basis. Both have their good and bad points, although I think they are both over rated for what they actually do. The Corel gets used extensively with a vinyl cutter as the software also operates as a plugin within Corel.

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Actually, with the exception of the warp with mesh feature, envelope warp, and Pathfinder, Illustrator hasn't really improved much since Illustrator 3. I think Adobe has bloated Illustrator with a bunch of crossover features from Photoshop that really add nothing to the program.
On the other hand, Photoshop is, without a doubt, the one program you really can't do without. If I had to select only one program to work with, it would be Photoshop. There are workarounds in Photoshop to deal with every situation that Illustrator (and likely CorelDRAW) simply can't address.