Recommended Design Software

We (and practically all other printers) require files to be submitted in pdf format. The 3 programs recommended below produce pdf files directly without the need for Adobe Acrobat. 

As there are many different types of books, magazines and multi-page brochures and catalogs,  each requiring different treatments, you will have to consider three very different programs.

Our primary software is Coreldraw. In my view, it is superior to the over-priced Adobe suite minus the traps and pitfalls when it comes to printing on commercial digital machines. Best of all, you can get full boxed version X5 for around $300 on eBay (as at Dec 2011). Comes complete with printed manuals etc. It is a great product and great value. All our work (including this book) is done in Coreldraw. Although we have Adobe CS4, I have banned its use in-house other than to open customers' work. 

Coreldraw is great for catalogs, brochures, business cards, posters, banners and anything you care to do except for thick books. Furthermore, it is very easy to learn,  extremely easy to use and provides great accuracy in alignments and placement of elements. A highly efficient program. We love it.

It comes with 1,000 fonts and the fabulously good Bitstream Font Manager - rated the best font manager around. You won't realise what a good font manager can do for the efficiency and convenience of your whole computer system until you've tried this.

Another great product comes from www.Xara.com, though not for books.

Its latest offering is called Photo & Graphic Designer 7 priced at only US$89 (plus postage) and its capabilities are simply astounding. Great for 3D work and creating buttons and logos. It is ideal for photo books, newsletters, brochures, business cards - an excellent tool for creating stunning Web pages too. One of our freelance designers has switched from Adobe to Xara's Pro version and has since purchased every product they produce. You can download a trial version from their site.

For photo books and family books, it is best to have the flexibility offered by either of the above 2 programs which are both very easy to learn and to use instead of having your creativity restricted by templates. Furthermore, Xara has a strong community offering great tutorials etc.

For regular books however, I cannot recommend OpenOffice highly enough. Download from www.openoffice.org. It is a community-based product and is free. It is an extremely powerful office suite similar to MS Office and includes a very competent Draw program which is not available in MS Office and it adheres more faithfully to PDF specifications than do Microsoft's products. MS Word and MS Publisher are notoriously bad at producing pdf files. We get endless headaches from customers who send us pdf files created from those two programs. 

I realise that nearly all graphic designers are loath to switching after their massive investment in Adobe products (both in dollars and training) and their accumulated GBs of .ai and .ndd files. Fortunately we made the switch years ago and have never looked back. Mind you we started off like almost everyone else with Macs and Adobe but became dissatisfied, researched, tested and the rest is history. 

I will be happy to assist you in getting started in any one of the above 3 recommended programs. We also have templates prepared for various projects and will he happy to email appropriate ones to you upon request. All without obligation. Happy creating! 

Francis Chuah
www.fcproductions.com.au