Hello everyone.
Have anyone seen this at the Corel website?
"find out how CorelDRAW Graphics Suite is evolving in 2021 to meet the demands of how designers work today."
Talking about "demands", here are mine:
Any thoughts or comments.
I haven't visited Corel's web site lately. But I have received a few emails about their online seminar "See What's Hot in 2011" Thursday, March 11 at 2:00pm ET/11:00am PT. I guess I may register for it.
I'm assuming Corel is going to unveil CorelDRAW 2021 either the same day or soon afterward.
Agreed 100% on what Corel should be doing to meet the demands of its customer base (not to mention trying to appeal to people who don't already use CorelDRAW). Their current approach is only going to cause them to slowly lose existing customers.
They need to be working a lot harder on fixing bugs and improving application performance. I've been pretty disgusted by the sheer lack of updates. CDR 2020 had 1 hot fix and 1 point release update. Illustrator CC 2020 had three significant point release updates and more than a dozen maintenance updates. AI CC 2021 is already in its ".2" version.
IMHO, $99 per year is a fair price for CorelDRAW. $249 per year is a rip-off. I think they need to go back to a 2 year product cycle as well as bring back perpetual license upgrades. Not only that, but I think they need to be platform agnostic.
If you have a registered CorelDRAW license and Corel user account you should be able to download the Windows or Mac version without paying anything extra. Adobe Creative Cloud users are not confined to one platform. You can install CC on two computers; one can be a PC and the other can be a Mac. They don't care. And they're working on updating their apps to run native on the Apple M1 CPUs. Corel will have to do the same thing.
I just received an email with the 2021 release.
The website also has the 2021 version.
Time to test and see if my bug list has any improvements...
I loved 2020 but this new 2021 CDR version looks really promising. I'm really liking the new features, especially exporting and the multipage layout. This is brilliant from the brief time I tried it out.
I'm a fan of the dark mode personally. The subscription price is reasonable and better than Adobe.
Well done Corel team.
Where are you seeing any details about the 2021 version? I haven't seen anything specific about it other than the link to sign up for their "what's new" seminar on Thursday. As for the price, $249 per year is actually kind of steep considering CorelDRAW and PhotoPaint are the only full blown creative applications in the suite. The rest of it is utilities such as the Font Manager. $54 per month is pretty steep for a full individual license of Adobe Creative Cloud, but the amount of applications and other features such as the Adobe Fonts service is pretty staggering.
Ok, now I see what's going on. Corel has emailed out update notices to users with active subscriptions or upgrade protection arrangements. Given some of the glitches I've been dealing with in CDR 2020 hopefully the 2021 version will have fixed those issues.
I received an email with installation instructions and links to unlisted video presentations.
I make my living as a designer with this tool. $250 is beyond worth it for me. If Adobe was better, I would pay the bigger price tag and use it instead.The good news is that Corel is better, and for less.
I'm thankful I got in early with the "upgrade protection" program and the $99 per year price. Version 2021 appears to only add multi-page views and a perspective drawing setup. Not exactly ground-breaking stuff. Freehand had the perspective drawing thing over 20 years ago. I might be willing to let that slide for $99. But it sure doesn't seem like enough for $249. Also, I'm finding certain bugs from CDR 2020 still not fixed. I had a couple of type super families that didn't work right in CDR 2020 and they still don't work right in this new version.I do not agree with that "Corel is better" blanket statement at all. I've been using CorelDRAW for nearly 30 years and Illustrator for almost as long (since 1993). There are indeed some things CorelDRAW does do better than Illustrator. But Illustrator is better in a number of other areas; there are certain functions available in Illustrator that aren't available in CorelDRAW at all. Illustrator long had a disadvantage of having a much smaller max art board size, but they increased it ten fold to 2275" X 2275" with the v24.2 update.Even though I do a lot of my sign design work within CorelDRAW, but I have to augment that with Illustrator for critical reasons like handling corporate branding content and other ad materials with 100% accuracy. That stuff usually comes as AI or EPS files generated within Illustrator. It's no big deal for CorelDRAW to import such files if the objects don't have certain kinds of fills and effects applied to them, just flat colors. Unfortunately not all client artwork comes that way. And then there's the issue of text objects. Corel is pretty suspect at importing AI files with a lot of editable text objects. And Corel isn't very good at exporting AI files with editable text objects; anything with multiple lines of copy (like paragraphs) opens in Illustrator completely messed up.
Tool preferences are personal, be it software or an axe, and none are perfect. The way I work, Corel fits like a glove.
I have to disagree on the precision in Illustrator, I found it extremely lacking (both drawing to size or snapping). Color accuracy for print not reliable. Vectors terrible, opening someone's Ai vector work in Ai was a crapshoot. Fonts were also extremely buggy and unflexible to use. Everything in Illustrator takes me 2-4 times longer for the same results. There are nice features, but too many deal breakers for me.
Yup. I hope they fixed whatever functions you had issues with.
Yes it looks promising. The perspective drawing has caught my attention. Hopefully they did something with the refresh issues the new object docker has had since 2019.
I haven't tried the perspective drawing yet.
New feature. I can switch between multipage view and single at any time. With Illustrator you're stuck with the artboard clutter, not to mention the size limitations. I like the flexibility.
It's too soon to say much about the 2021 version, except that I just installed it, and it launched in about half the time it takes for 2020 to launch on my computer. That's pretty impressive. I hope the performance improvements are this good in actual usage.