CorelDRAW

While Adobe Illustrator is the standard for high-fashion technical flats, CorelDRAW maintains a massive, unshakable stronghold in the decorated apparel sector. If a business screen-prints t-shirts, embroiders custom polo shirts, or creates sublimated athletic jerseys, there is a very high probability they use CorelDRAW as their primary design engine. The reason for this dominance is its incredibly tight integration with specific industrial hardware. Many automated screen-printing color separation programs, vinyl cutters, and embroidery digitizing software packages were built specifically as plugins for CorelDRAW. An artist can design a logo, run a plugin to instantly convert it into a stitch file, and send it directly to the embroidery machine. It is also highly favored in the activewear and sportswear markets for its advanced contouring and tracing tools. A designer can take a rough, pixelated jpeg of a local high school's mascot, use Corel's PowerTrace feature to cleanly convert it into a scalable vector graphic, and lay it out on a digital jersey template for dye-sublimation printing. It is the workhorse software of the custom apparel industry.