Creative Graphics

CorelDRAW® allows a non-designer
to create professional signs“It’s very important when you’re pressedfor time. CorelDRAW just fits extremely
well into our workflow.”
Richard Parrish
owner Vinyl Creations

Richard Parrish is the ownerand founder of Vinyl
Creations, a small signmaking shop located in Port
Orange, Florida. RichardParrish hasn’t taken any
formal training in graphic
design, but the software heuses to create his vinyl
signs, banners and decals isso user-friendly he cancreate professional-looking
designs in a matter ofminutes. “Many of myclients bring me in a logo
on a piece of paper and ask
me if I can create a banner
or a sign based on thatlogo. Thanks to CorelDRAW
Graphics Suite I can say ‘noproblem’ with confidence.
It really is that good.”

Vinyl Creations is a 3-person operation, andlike in most small businesses, all employees
have to be prepared to do a bit of everything.
Richard creates most of the signs, such asprofessional office signs, storefronts, magnetic
signs as well as decals for sports or danceteams etc. His wife, Lisbeth, is the president ofthe company and handles the books.
“I guess you could say she’s in charge,” says
Richard on the phone from the office inFlorida.
Richard Parrish worked for 7 years as a police
officer in the Daytona area, but after being
injured on the job in 2001, he decided tomake a career change. Despite the fact that
he had no previous experience with graphics
or printing, he founded Parrish Enterprises andVinyl Creations. The company is growing andRichard attributes a big part of the success tothe software package that makes it all cometogether – CorelDRAW Graphics Suite.
“We work exclusively in CorelDRAW,” says
Richard Parrish. “But we also rely heavily onan add-on product designed for CorelDRAW,called Smart Designer.
Smart Designer is a program developed
specifically for the imprinting industry by acompany called Smart Designs. The templatedriven program enables the user to attach an
additional graphics programs to CorelDRAW,
and instantly access both of them using split®

screen technology. Smart Designer makes it
possible for anyone, regardless of skill level, toproduce high quality custom graphics in an
efficient manner. With CorelDRAW as its
engine, Smart Designer, has become theleading design application for imprinters.
“It has become a real life-saver here at Vinyl
Creations,” explains Richard Parrish. “We’ve
been able to establish an extremely efficientsystem that allows us to show our clients what
we can do in a matter of minutes.”
If a client is interested in creating a schoolteam basketball banner for instance, it
couldn’t be easier to browse the basketballcategory, pick a design with some default text
wrapped around a basketball, enter the newname in a text box and click OK. The program
updates the design with the new nameautomatically.
“A lot of my clients think I’m some kind ofdesign genius,” says Richard Parrish andlaughs.
Studies show that people who produce
graphics themselves can cut their art
production time by 50 to 90 percent by using
CorelDRAW and Smart Designer.
"We work quite a bit with International
Speedway Corp. and Americrown, and weregularly get rush orders on new signs orbanners for NASCAR events," says Richard.

Another benefit ofusing CorelDRAW atVinyl Creations is thefact that the designers
can export the files
directly to theirplotters and othermachines from within
the application.

“It’s happened on more than one occasion
that they call us on Friday afternoon and needsomething for an event or a race on Saturdaymorning. Then you can’t spend a lot of time
adjusting every detail of your design. You justneed to get it done as quickly as possible.
CorelDRAW has come through for us every
time and the best part is that the final productstill looks very professional.”
When you’re designing and manufacturing
large-scale vinyl signs, you occasionally have tocreate magic out of thin air.
Says Richard Parrish: “A while back we had awoman come in with an old business card
she’d carried around in her purse for years.
Naturally, it was a bit banged up andwrinkled. She wanted us to create a 35-footbanner based on the tiny logo on the card.
Impossible, right? Well, I scanned the businesscard with the highest resolution and saved it
as a pretty large bitmap file. I imported theimage into CorelTRACE and traced the outlineof the logo using the Advanced Outlinesetting”.
CorelTRACE, included in the CorelDRAW
Graphics Suite, is an application that analyzes
pixel patterns in a bitmap image and recreates
the image as a vector file. The program’s®

To find out more about this product or
any other Corel product, please visit
www.corel.com or call 1-800-772-6735.

© 2005 Corel Corporation. All rights reserved. 02/05 JB#149

Advanced Outline setting produces a vector
graphic that closely resembles the original
bitmap, and it allows you to set advanced
trace options such as Noise Filter, Complexity
and Node Reduction levels.
The benefit of using a vector file is that it isresolution independent. You can enlarge itvirtually indefinitely without losing quality. A
bitmap on the other hand quickly displays
jagged edges if it is enlarged beyond its
original size.
“The resulting logo needed only a modest
amount of tweaking in CorelDRAW, such as
adjusting a few nodes and straightening theodd line here and there. But having a highquality vector file of the logo allowed us tocreate the banner for the client.”
Another benefit of using CorelDRAW at Vinyl
Creations is the fact that the designers canexport the files directly to their plotters andother machines from within the application.
There’s no need to create workaroundsolutions.
“It’s very important when you’re pressed fortime. CorelDRAW just fits extremely well into
our workflow,” concludes Richard Parrish.