Teefury

I suspect I might be switching to Coreldraw sometime soon. I'm disliking Illustrator very much at the moment. I recently switched to using it and I'm not enjoying it. Quite how it became some sort of industry standard I will never know. My battles with its feeble interface are part of the reason why I've not had time to be on the forums lately to give concrit. That and all the tee trade threads sinking the ones I want to read.

Anyway, I realise this is a wip but the misalignment between the red outer frame and the black outside edge made it look a bit 3d. So then I thought, if you aligned it properly but made every black edge that is to the left and the top of every red part a little bit lighter that would give it a cool 3d quality.

Basically, you'd be giving it the appearance of a bevel.

I'm confused, what misalignment are you talking about? Do you mean how the thicker outer edge on the right makes the inner diamond's bottom tip look off center? I can fix that easily, I admittedly did this pretty quickly just so I could show it for feedback.

I'll update it with correct alignments and try what you said, thanks!

You guys are confusing me.... Why is Illustrator so bad? I know it's expensive but when you work in the industry you can get cheap or for free :)

To prove how good it is- The other day I was making the boardwalk empire logo and I looked at a photoshop tutorial(there were no illustrator tutorials available) to see how they made the logo exactly... I accomplished it without the directions and in Illustrator no problem. I even made it all halftone so it could be shirt printed. The original logo has too many gradients to be printed on a 10 dollar tee.

Also Illustrator has alignment tools that will fix your simple lining issue within seconds. Also if you want to avoid that alignment issue in the future you just make a red shape and then go to Object- the Path- then Offset Path and you plug in how big you want the black outlined shape to be(You can set the path however thick in inches, pixels, picas, mm and cm). It automatically centers it perfectly. If you don't want it centered than you just ungroup it so you can move the black shape from the red shape in a way so it has a shadow effect (or bevel).

I myself have no gripes with Photoshop or Illustrator, I just prefer CorelDRAW so far. I would try what you said if I actually had a full version of Illustrator, but I'm pretty sure I can correct it just as easily with what I do have.

I'm currently using Illustrator, and i don't know how in the hell to use it. The instructions i found are REALLY vague, and confusing. So if anybody knows any good tutorials or instructions on how to understand and fully use Illustrator

Maybe I'll download CorelDraw this week and see what the fuss is about. If I'm not mistaken CorelDraw is the easiest program for importing your art and vectorizing it(plus it has options of stylizing your art in vector format the way photoshop has filters). Illustrator has a live trace function as well. However you need to size your art to massive proportions to get a good clean trace. So I take the long road and clean my art by tracing over my ink with the pen tool.

during my graphics design training I learned how to use CorelDraw (that was back in 2000) and it's the programme I pretty much know by heart. due to an internship earlier this year I started using Adobe's CS just to see what the hype was all about. yes yes, it's very impressive and everything, it took me a while to get a grasp of the basic principles, but ince you've gotten into it, it's really amazing. still ... I'd say Corel is much more easy to use.

and since I also write as a reviewer for some wholesale company I got a free copy of Corel X5 just last month for testing purposes. As I'm not overly keen on producing my personal stuff thru my employers Adobe CS license (or that student license they gave me) I'm very happy to now have the opportunity to go back to CorelDraw.

as of now, I still have to find things I can't do with Corel but can do with Illustrator/PS.

so yeah, no matter how "pro" you are ... when it comes to designing prints for shirts, I don't think there's a real justification for spending $1.000 more just to have an Adobe product. they're great, that's for sure ... but they clearly need an advanced graphic designer to use the full potential of that programme. they're not overly complicated or anything, just really effin' complex I guess

CorelDraw can make things easier ... but in the end it's like "Mac or PC" ... there is no right anwer and it depends on ... stuff (fyi: the right answer is, of course, PC ;D )

I've been using CorelDraw for 12+ years now, and I use illustrator and PS as well. CorelDraw is the most user friendly program out of the three. They all have their positive points, as in the auto trace in illustrator beats corel's hands down. If you guys need any help with corel, just hit me up!

Never used Corel so no comment there but back on topic...


The red stroke that creates the diamond isn't even all the way around, you might have already caught that with Chuffy suggestion. It's thinner on top then gets wider.

I'd suggest thinning all the black lines out. I think the strokes too bold.