Expert: Ran - 2/28/2009

Question
I'd like to create a few designs for t-shirts to use on cafepress.com but I'm not sure which program to use. The few that I have used have very low dpi and I don't know enough about programs to choose one that is suitable. I also don't want to pay too much for it ($200+) as I would only use it as a hobby. The designs use text and simple drawings. Thank you.

Answer
Well I don't know anything about T-shirt printing but if you can afford CorelDraw you will love it. It can save your files in all the formats you are likely to ever need and out of the box it uses a resolution of 300dpi which will be fine. And you won't outgrow it because it is capable of very much more than you actually need right now.

I would think you'd be better off with a vector drawing program (e.g. CorelDraw, Adobe Illustrator) rather than a bitmap editor (Paint Shop, Photoshop) for designing T-shirts, and they handle text much more easily too.

In fact I've just looked on Ebay and found several boxed CorelDraw sets within your budget, so give it a whirl! The current version is version 14 (called X4).