It is a perfect suite of applications to finish presentations and create beautiful layouts for design. It is very useful both for graphic design and for architecture design when you want to draw a realistic idea of a project without being a rendering or when you need to present both images and vectorial drawings.
SketchUp is great for individually studying options for building design. It is an awesome conceptual tool to be able to quickly model and manipulate a building to study different designs. It is not good for complex geometries, especially curves. Surfaces have a hard time registering and cutting into one another. It also eventually needs to go into Revit to be more realistic as it is not good as a documentation tool
Quickly exploring solutions in 3D: We get a lot of "what if" and "what would that look like" questions. While hand-sketching and hand-drafting can be fairly quick, SketchUp allows me to quickly create 3D and 2D views of a detail or solution, change dimensions and materials in a flash, and show a client or installer the plan in minutes.
Creating professional design documents in LayOut: Projects of any scale need good documentation. Using a combination of SketchUp and LayOut, I can create a Design Intent Set, plans for permitting, a set for mechanical trades to mark-up, etc. Having clear, appropriately-scaled drawings with dimensions or notations is a must, and we don't always have the time or budget to get an architect involved!
Using live files to guide discussions: Not all clients are "visual" people, so opening their model and orbiting around their space in real time has been extremely helpful. Clients and trades enjoy the perspective views so much that we often include them in the full-sized drawing sets to give a good "overall" view of the project intent. For complex or tight spaces, sometimes un-rendered plans and elevations just aren't enough!
We typically wait a few years in between renewing, as even older versions are powerful tools for modeling, and we make sure the amount of feature changes are worth the re-investment.
Just like any design program or suite, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who doesn't do graphic design professionally. If you're not adept at learning a program or experience, it isn't a program you can just pick up and start using easily. Outside of the learning curve, it's a nice program with a decent user interface.
It is very user friendly and easy to learn. It's simplicity allows for a low learning curve so more people can learn it faster. The downside is that most schools are no longer teaching it, so many younger professionals come out of school not knowing it and knowing more complex software and they have a hard time "dumbing down" their skillsets
Overall, CorelDRAW meets all my needs as a researcher and allows me to create beautiful and clear graphics to illustrate the main ideas for publications. It does not lack any functionality for my needs; however, it has some bugs that impact productivity, such as the color drag and drop that sometimes stops working and needs restarting, and crashes, especially when working with large bitmaps.
Sketchup is so intuitive; I can't recall ever looking for official support. However, there are many user forums online that can answer more questions. The usefulness of the online forums is, however, tempered by the fact that there have been many versions of the software under different ownership and support regimes, and thus finding the right information for the right version of the software can be a challenge.
Although other softwares are good in there field but CorelDRAW is very good when it come to ease of making the designs. We can create designs in it very quickly and efficiently and also it us Avery easy software to learn, anyone can pick it up at good pace. Also it is more widely used by vendors here for printing, so its a better choice.
We have not evaluated any other competing software to this one. I heard about this software from a friend who teaches how to use it. She showed me in just a few minutes and I was HOOKED. I saw immediately the possible help it would be to my business. Thank you.
Ease of use reflects on less time to train new users, a positive impact in investment and productivity.
The practicality to make new designs results in less time needed to do them, again a positive impact.
The integration with other graphic programs could be better if needed to finish a rendering using the design made in Corel Draw it's needed to export in formats that don't carry all information and the process is not that simple.
