Creative Graphics Solutions
CorelDRAW

Gigantic mazes conceived withthe design granularity and color
precision of CorelDRAW®

“We compared an aerial photo of the mazewith the CorelDRAW rendering. The colors werespot on. I could have dropped the printout
directly into the photograph.”
Adrian Fisher, maze designer
Adrian Fisher Mazes Ltd., U.K.
CorelDRAW user since 1993

ENTERPRISE

The Story

The Solution

Adrian Fisher Mazes Ltd., U.K.
www.mazemaker.com
Global maze design company

For more than 24 years, Adrian Fisher has amazedtourists around the world with his extraordinary maze
designs. He and his wife Marie own Adrian Fisher
Mazes Ltd., the world’s leading maze design company.

Using CorelDRAW, Fisher has developed various versionsof the Jasmine Tea Maze, showing the bush composition
and three separate networks of pathways with varying
levels of navigation difficulty: bronze, silver and gold.
Each network is contained within parts of the same
rectangular space but varies in its complexity.

CHALLENGE
To design and render complex
maze configurations in full color

SOLUTION
CorelDRAW ®

BENEFITS
Cost savings, increased productivity
and enhanced design quality

With a team of 12 designers and sales staff in Britain,and eight additional staff in other countries, Fisher has
used corn maize, hedges, mirrors, interlocking brick andmosaic tile to create mazes of all types and proportionsat prominent sites around the globe. Fisher also builds‘finger’ mazes—those made of plastic and installed inchildren’s playgrounds—and designed the world’s firstmaize and water mazes.
He and his team design 90 mazes each year—all usingCorelDRAW®.

The Challenge
Fisher has designed hedge mazes
for British castles, palaces andstately homes; he’s createdmirror, brick and corn mazes for
major tourist sites in Chicago,West Palm Beach, Boston andWith every maze Fisher undertakes, quality and cost
are of primary concern. Because his customers arelocated around the world, he requires an efficient way
to share his design renderings with clients. He also needs
to ensure that the various dimensions of a design—
its navigational complexity or color treatment, forexample—can be well represented for the client’s clear
understanding.

Atlanta; and has built a brick
Beatles maze for the Liverpool
International Garden Festivalthat incorporated a 51-foot-longyellow submarine.

This is certainly true for the Jasmine Tea Maze that Fisher
is designing as part of the celebrations during the 2008
Olympic Summer Games in Yunnan Province, China. It
will be the largest permanent maze in the world, making
Fisher a world-record breaker for the seventh time.

Communicating his vision to his customer in China
has been easy, Fisher says. “We render our designs inCorelDRAW and send them as file attachments.
CorelDRAW is a widely recognized industry standard,so clients can use our documents easily. Using
CorelDRAW and e-mail together, we spend far lessmoney than we used to.”CorelDRAW also delivers considerable savings in theproduction of Fisher’s Finger Mazes—by eliminating
the need for manufacturer redrawings. “We no longer
have to pay drilling and routing companies hundredsof dollars to render plans,” Fisher says. “We can do it
all in-house with the software. That allows us to offer
a wider range of designs.”

The Features
The color capabilities of CorelDRAW are its mostvaluable features, Fisher says. “We as a company arevery interested in the mathematics of decorative paving.
There are 43 different colors of clay available for brickpaving. We have matched every single one to theappropriate Pantone. CorelDRAW allows us to selectany of them, choose a brick of a particular shape andflood the color in, then print it out. You see exactly
what you’re going to get.”“Fisher uses
CorelDRAW to design
every maze he and his
team create. He builds
90 mazes each year
and has erected 400 in
total—in 27 different
countries.”

That’s the approach Fisher used when developing a44-foot diameter interlocking brick design for the Mallof Georgia in Atlanta. He began by laying out thenetwork—a to-scale repertoire of various bricks: Fisher
Pavers (seven-sided bricks he himself invented), Mitre
Bricks (unusual non-rectangular bricks he also invented),
and five- and four-sided bricks to form a giant seashellpattern. It’s the method he uses for every paving
assignment.

for creating meaningful images of what carefully
selected grades of paver color will look like—wireframe
is no substitute for solid areas of color.”“I select the bricks, then apply color using the color
bar and the Special Fill tool in CorelDRAW. In front ofmy eyes, the whole design grows,” Fisher says. “Then Ican press Ctrl-G to select a group of pavers if I want tochange the color for that group.”
If a drawing becomes too detailed, Fisher uses CorelDRAWto zoom in and out. “We can scale it up into additional
drawings for detail (to the 12th decimal place). It’s soaccurate. You can scale it up, then go back to the100th or 1,000th,” he says.

Competing design
products, such as thoseused by architects andlandscape designers,
don’t offer the samefunctional simplicity anddesign sophistication,
Fisher says.

“The productivity of doing it this way is superb. We
spend less time on the computer, have perfect results,
and produce incredible renditions. We often do half adozen variations, decide which one we like, then makeour recommendation to the client.”
The CorelDRAW printouts are so precise, they become
guides during onsite construction. “We break a design
into printouts of four to 12 sectional drawings, thenlaminate them. The drawings are crucial duringinstallation.”
Competing design products, such as those used byarchitects and landscape designers, don’t offer thesame functional simplicity and design sophistication,
Fisher says. “Some of the widely used software isdifficult to master. It’s cumbersome and actually not
helpful. More importantly, other software is ineffective

www.corel.com

When he wants to render a more painterly version of adesign, Fisher uses Corel® Painter™ in conjunction withCorelDRAW. One client, a Duchess in England, once
asked for a painted design, espousing the traditional
approach over computer-generated drawings. Herresponse to the Corel Painter output: “Who’s thewatercolorist?”“The design looked as though the pencil hadn’t washedand the color had,” Fisher says. “That’s the versatility
you can expect with Corel products.”

The Benefits
While cost savings, increased productivity and enhanced
quality are the primary benefits Fisher derives from
CorelDRAW, he notes a few others.
The program facilitates collaborative design. “I can takea design to a certain point, hand it on to a colleague,then it can be handed on again, then back to me. It
works very seamlessly.”It’s also backwards-compatible. “Unlike most software
programs, it allows you to convert a file from, say,CorelDRAW 11 to CorelDRAW 8.”
The interoperability is impressive, too, he says. “It’sa tribute to the product that there aren’t moreinteroperability troubles with Microsoft OS. Incidents
of falldown are rare,” Fisher says. In addition, thesoftware allows Fisher to scan digital photos, resize
them in Corel PHOTO-PAINT®, then import them intoCorelDRAW—seamlessly. And the final product can beconverted into a number of different formats.

To find out more about this product or
any other Corel product, please visit
www.corel.com/allproducts or call oursales office at 1-877-652-6735.

© 2003 Corel Corporation. All rights reserved.

Printed in Canada 10/03 JB#2081-541