Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw?

[blubber]

Freehand - because everything is math

[Keops]

I used to work with Freehand, then I tried Illustrator and while its true that the interface is similar to the one in all Adobe products (a plus for Photoshop users) I have to give my vote to CorelDRAW. Ever since I began working in my current workplace, where the main application we use is Corel I've become quite used to it's interface and to me it has the easiest to use keyboard shortcuts and everything is quite intuitive, didn't take long to learn and now, well, what can I say, I'm a Corel advocate.

For raster work, Photoshop is still king anyway, but I find Illustrator unnecesarily complex and counterintuitive.

This is just my opinion heh, as some people have pointed I suggest you try them all and find which one suits you better.

Just don't use sodipodi (Just kidding). Anyone ever tried any open source vector illustration apps? I believe there is one called Inkscape or something like that, never tried it though.

See you!

[Dogmeat]

I used to design all the billboards in phoenix AZ.

We used Corel Draw, Illustrator and Quark on the mac.

Corel is clunky and slow and is your lower priced desktop publishing software.

Quark is a step above Corel, but is very hard to get used to using and has a learning curve.

Illustrator is definitely #1 on my list, I don't know if I have a bias since I've always used adobe products but it has the least confusing interface, smooth, solid, quick, integrates with anything else. Also costs the most.

If you're starting off with desktop publishing, definitely start with Corel since it's cheap.

If money and time don't matter to you, go buy Illustrator and do what you need to do to learn it.

[Ai]

Inkscape

It's good. It has the easiest to use interface of all the vector drawing apps I've used
(which are: Inkscape, TGIF, XFIG,  Sodipodi, ranked best to worst). It has a comprehensive and accessible feature set. It supports Adobe Illustrator format if you need it; Its native format is a superset of SVG.
The only thing that I know it doesn't do yet is animation. The other possible issue is that with extremely complex graphics, it slows down a lot (I assume that hardly anyone but me would be generating graphics of such complexity, though.)

[Takai Soyokaze]

Freehand is awesome... but I guesses its dying, then use Inkscape, it's like GIMP for vector art.

I can't stand everyone ragging on GIMP though, most of the stuff people complain about can be fixed.

[Ai]

Takai Soyokaze:

Gimp is fine. Especially since version 2.3.8, when it clipboard brush, clipboard pattern, and actions to change to next/previous palette color or indexed colormap color were added. This last feature was implemented by me. Clipboard pattern is really helpful for dithering, and clipboard brush is useful for the same things as it is in DPaint. Personally I find working with the ink tool on an indexed image is very useful for pixelling, oekaki and CG all. The Colormap Rearrange plugin, which was added in the 2.3.x series, is also useful for indexed work when your palette is somewhat big (32 or more colors.)