Looking to expand from Flexi Cloud

[Tropics09]

What kind of benefits are there to adding Illustrator into our repitoire? Our niche really is our speed in finishing jobs, but I am trying to get the business to focus a little more on design while maintaining our production speed. Any advice would be helpful.

Thanks

 

[shoresigns]

Well if speed is a factor in your design as much as in production, I find Illustrator's workflow to be much faster than Flexi, in terms of the interface, keyboard shortcuts, etc. Your mileage may vary of course.

 

[BIG EASY DOES IT]

Illustrator has some really good tools. some that work better then flexi. Flexi just encompasses a lot of programs into one program. If I were going to try and expand I would get photoshop. Photoshop has a lot of different tools that illy and flexi don't have. And is a thousand times better if you need to make any changes to a photo or such.

 

[rjssigns]

Depends on your business model or niche. If you do a lot of vector graphics, and layouts use Illustrator. Lots of photo manipulation and fine art repro get Photoshop.

My personal favorite is Illustrator. Use it everyday and knock out 99.9% of our work. Also use Flexi and Xara as needed. Each program has strengths and we exploit them.

There will never be the perfect program that does everything well.

Incidentally I was at the local tech college for the annual QRP meeting. When asked what program should be taught first semester the shop owners all said Illustrator.

Order of preference for signs shops went like this: Illustrator, Photoshop, and a distant third InDesign.