Adobe Illustrator CC vs. Corel Painter vs. Digital Signer

Adobe Illustrator is used to help make drawings look good but not make them. It is easy to add color or texture but it is hard to actually make the drawings in it. I would recommend using other software to make the lines for plans and sections and using Adobe Illustrator to make it look good.

Corel painter is one of the best tools in the market for specialized designing and painting. The spotlight option with watercolor marking is very unique. The new Captured Dab Library is one of the best features of the latest update. The new enhanced brush settings and the redesigned brush libraries make life so much easier.

Incentivized

• Vector graphics for scaling to large sizes
• Filling an object with a texture
• Easily adjusting and expanding an artboard to fit the size of the content (especially for infographics)
• Compatibility with other Adobe CC programs, but also exporting for PPT graphics

Incentivized

• Watercolor Compatible
• Multiple variety of Brushes and shapes
• Captured Dab Library

Incentivized

• Illustrator Files can get large/cumbersome when you begin to incorporate high resolution photography, especially if you 'place' the photo instead of linking to it's source file
• Typography can sometimes be a challenge, especially if you working on different machines that may not always have the font you need installed or sending the file to a commercial printer
• OLDER versions of Illustrator can be a bit temperamental about being backward compatible though this issue has been greatly reduced with Adobe's move the Cloud Based subscription model
• Not great for large print layouts (books, magazine etc) you're better off to move the project to Adobe InDesign in that case.

Incentivized

• Way too many functional bugs, makes it hard to work with
• Bad UX and usability, too much unintuitive behavior, makes it particularly hard to work with
• Overall looks and behaves as if it was coded in the '90s, it really needs a complete UX overhaul
• Did I mention the many bugs yet? Yeah? I'll mention it again because it's bad

While Adobe Illustrator CC is one of the only true design software out there, it really stands heads above the other products. It's clean UI and menu structure is easy to navigate.

Incentivized

There's a bit of a learning curve to this software vs other similar tools that can take some time to learn and get familiar with but the amount of functionality that Adobe Illustrator CC offers is quite large compared to simpler tools.

Incentivized

If it wasn't quite clear yet, I'll state it again: the usability of Corel Painter is, simply put, horrid. And I am not talking about rendering, lagging, etc., it is not even all that bad there. I am talking about the weird issues like being unable to move a brush into a custom brush palette when you work on a second screen, like being unable to move the software onto the second screen in the first place unless you separate all the palettes and the windows (and if nobody tells you upfront there is no way of knowing because the manual doesn't state this at all), and then having to drag all your separate windows and palettes over one by one every time your computer wakes up again, and they won't really want to move to the other screen but only through a tiny corner of your screen, and the fact that you have to scroll through lists and lists of fonts but can't search and when you apply this font, add another piece of text the font jumps back to the default font of all the text already applied even when you haven't selected any of the text. Just to name a very small few.

I normally already know how to do whatever I'm trying out, but the documentation (as well as a simple Google search) makes any question quick to resolve. The Adobe boards themselves are a fantastic resource, especially for resolving questions between new programs and iterative releases.

Incentivized

It was really hard to get them to understand what I was having problems with. It was hard to get the message through that Painter has an unacceptable amount of functional and UX bugs. When I finally talked to someone who was easier to communicate with, he was very stoic about the situation, like they didn't really care about the awful amount of bugs.

It was very easy to purchase and download.

Incentivized

I have been using all of these tools for years. Illustrator is usually my go to tool. Once you learn Illustrator, it makes using all of the other programs easier to learn and it integrates with them beautifully. For the most part, each tool has it's own strengths - InDesign for layout, Photoshop for pixels, etc., but for me, working with vectors is my prime need.

Like I already mentioned Photoshop is so much more pleasant to work with. Though out of the box Photoshop definitely has a lot fewer brushes; you can definitely download bushes often for free, or otherwise a small fee (you have to pay to add more brushes with Painter as well). Painter has so many horrible bugs, functional as well as usability bugs, it's just very, very sloppy definitely compared to Photoshop which is virtually bug-free nowadays. All due respect to programmers, I have been a coder myself, but it is obvious that Painter is built by coders and coders alone, it is obvious there have not been many designers (UX or otherwise) involved in the development of Painter. I got Painter on a discount (luckily or I would have been really ticked off) and I wanted to try it out. I would NEVER pay $500 for it now I know it is riddled with bugs.

• Improved engagement in employee programs that are now represented in documents created using Illustrator.
• Improved customer outcomes/interest as a result of materials created using Illustrator.
• Better ROI on the programs we have developed or introduced due to the higher engagement and involvement.

Incentivized

• Waste of money
• Waste of time trying to work around all the bugs
• Waste of time trying to talk to customer service