My wife and I owned a mail order manufacturing and distribution business which required that we produce and mail a catalog every 4 weeks. We did all the graphics in house – even some of the photography. Because it was so graphics and deadline oriented, we got plenty of practice. I have always been interested in mechanical drawing and illustration. When desktop publishing first became popular in the mid to late 1980s, we immediately saw the potential. At that time we were developing quite a bit of printed material for our business. We realized we could save a lot of money and time by doing it ourselves.

It is a combination, really. One has to have artistic talent, but at the same time have the technical skills to work with a variety of applications and file formats. One has to be able to hand off viable files that printers and service providers can work with and be able to offer alternatives in case there are incompatibilities.

It really depends on a person’s natural abilities. Some people are naturally talented and observant. If one is also a quick study and gets good advice (from published material or from teachers and experienced people in the field) he or she may be able to produce very good results with enough training and practice.

I have a background in mechanical drawing and illustration, plus I was exposed to the old techniques that were in use prior to the desktop computer. At that time everything was done by paste up. We used to knock out the backgrounds of photos by cutting a rubylith mask with a knife then take everything to a litho house and have them strip all the pieces together into a single composition (the final film).

So I had a lot of practice, but I also had a lot of questions and gaps in my training. Once I had the time to devote to it, I was able to fill in those gaps and put all the pieces together. I suppose the qualities I have are that I’m not satisfied until I really understand how to use the various tools.

I don’t have a lot of experience with PageMaker, but in general, it doesn’t have the same level of control that QuarkXPress has. Quark is deep. It provides so many of the finer details that you can run into. Things are changing now that Adobe has released InDesign, but Quark is still very entrenched. I think PageMaker is better suited for the part time user or for jobs that don’t require the same level of detail as QuarkXPress or InDesign.

FreeHand has a nice “snap to point”. I also like the “find and replace graphics”. Sometimes I have to replace a color throughout the file. I also like the fact that FreeHand supports multiple page documents and that each page can be a different size.

Again, I feel that FreeHand and Illustrator are more reliable than CorelDRAW, but this opinion is just based on my experience. I have noticed, however, that more and more service providers support CorelDRAW than in the past. Please bear in mind I don’t have the latest versions of Illustrator, FreeHand or CorelDRAW so I am only going by the older versions I am using. I want to be fair in my comments.

Yes, it’s the only image editor I use – along with ImageReady. I also use Macromedia Fireworks, but mainly for making menu bars and rollover buttons for websites after I have done the image editing in Photoshop and ImageReady. Photoshop is just the best.