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Shout out to deck designers, what is the best program for designing decks?

Im looking at preferably free and easy to download programs. Thanks.

I don't use any free programs. I use a mix of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. The closest thing to Photoshop that would be free is called Gimp. I never used it but I've seen nice results from others using that program. Adobe Photoshop you can get a 30 day trial for free.

I have used gimp and it is good and it can help with learning illustration on the computer. But if I remember correctly USPC will not accept GIMP files. If you plan on using USPC to print your cards then go to their website and you can download their information packet. The packet has their best practices and a lot of good information to know when you are starting to design your cards. I subscribed to Adobe's monthly fee program. It was on sale for the first year for $20.00 a month and then it goes to $30.00 but you get all the updates as long as you are a member. You also get all the programs they offer.

I'm not a card designer but I do work at a sign company doing printing and layouts. The top dogs are definitely Adobe and Corel. Most of them offer free trials. I doubt you'll find full, free software that even comes close to the robustness of those two.

You can find some good deals online. But if 300-600 bucks is beyond the price range, you can buy cheap older versions of these softwares online but you sacrifice operating system compatibility.

You can get Adobe Createive Suite CS2 for free. Kinda.

Adobe no longer support the software and shutdoun the activation servers. So that legacy users could still activate their software Adobe posted download links with activation keys publicly.
(All you need is a free adobe account.)

If that's not giving it away... well...

https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitleme ... _downloads

Echoing the masses, if you are serious about it, there are really only two programs: Photoshop, and Illustrator. Most all printers (USPCC included) will expect to get files in those formats anyways, so it's realistically just about your only choice.

I always thought that technically the printer only needs a pdf to print from, unless they are going to edit the image themselves. I have always taken pdf files in to print, but those were very small jobs.

Back at the shop, we work with AI and PSD but we always export to PDF to print most of the time. Still conserves editing capabilities.

all my deck project so far have requested AI or PSD. In many cases, the prepress folks make some adjustments or might have to do additional spot color channel work and they seem to prefer getting the "real" thing upfront.