When it comes to full time graphic design jobs CorelDRAW is widely used in niche categories, like sign design, embroidery or screen printing. That's where Affinity Designer and other low cost apps become an even bigger threat. Then there is the overall identity of the CorelDRAW user base, mostly home/office productivity and casual users. That kind of ruined any selling advantage CorelDRAW had for users looking to escape Adobe's subscription-only model. Then they killed off perpetual license upgrades and adopted IMHO an onerous pricing and subscription setup. Their first Mac release in many years (CDR 2019) had all kinds of problems. Corel is not getting many existing Illustrator users to defect from using Creative Cloud. Still, I think Affinity Designer and other low cost/free vector graphics programs are a growing threat to CorelDRAW. afdesign files come in for various sign projects. Despite some of its limitations the application is growing in popularity, so I figured it might be a good idea to jump on that sale just to have the application on hand in case we start seeing a decent number of customer provided. I bought Windows and iPad versions of Affinity Designer when Serif was having its 50% COVID-19 themed sale last Spring. I'm personally not afraid of Affinity Designer or the other lower cost upstarts. Corel isn't in the same league as Adobe and they're about to be caught in the middle by these newer, more affordable upstarts. Other lower cost rival drawing applications (Inkscape, Affinity Designer, Vectornator, etc) are continuing to improve. They need to bring back perpetual license upgrades and charge a fair price for them. I think Corel needs to go back to a 2 year product cycle with CorelDRAW. The hazard of sticking with an old version is Microsoft could come along and change something in Windows that prevents that old software from running. It seems pretty sensible considering the lack of new features and improvments in the newer versions. This is resulting in a lot of users staying put on older versions of the software. Later they raised their annual subscription and "upgrade protection" prices by $50. They did away with perpetual license upgrades. Compare that to three point-release updates for Illustrator CC 2020 and perhaps a dozen or more maintenance updates.Ĭorel has made some dubious business decisions lately. CorelDRAW 2020 has received only one point-release update and only one "hot fix" update. Worse yet, maintenance updates have been few and far between. They're not building up enough new features and improvements in a 12 month time span for the product to be worthy of a whole version number change, and the cost to users that goes along with it. I don't think Corel has the resources to release whole versions of CorelDRAW on an annual basis. Version 2020 was better, but the only notable improvement was the addition of Variable Font support. I'm somewhat concerned about the future of the CorelDRAW application. The newest version of Illustrator will open 30 year old AI files. The last few versions of CorelDRAW won't open CDR files made in version 5 or earlier. I have some ancient CorelDRAW CDR files if I ever need to open them I have to use Inkscape to do that. But it's still not 100% accurate and may never be. CorelDRAW has grown better in its last couple or so versions at opening Illustrator files and exporting AI files that will open properly in Illustrator. It makes moving artwork between the two applications an adventure. The two applications overlap each other with most features but then there are numerous other areas where the two have unique features or capabilities not found in the rival. I use both CorelDRAW and Adobe Illustrator heavily. I had to uninstall and reinstall the whole Creative Suite (or Cloud) package in order for Illustrator to run again. There was one instance where I tried to open a CDR file directly in Illustrator and something happened that completely trashed my Illustrator installation. The capabilitiy was around for only a short amount of time because of bugs. Some years ago Adobe Illustrator had a CorelDRAW import filter.
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