Design your desk

by Joseph Diaz
Like clockwork, after the holiday season but
before spring, we typically get a little break from
the hectic workflow that we normally experience
here at our sign shop. We take that opportunity

to focus on the business and clean up around the
office and shop. This year it was decided that I
needed a new desk. Rather than going to the
furniture store or the office supply store to pick
out a desk, we felt like making something a bit
more custom would be the way to go. Like most
projects we work on here, we always seem to turn
to Corel Software in order to design what we
intend to build.
Furniture is quite different than the normal sign
work we create, but it's similar in a lot of ways
too, and we have the equipment and hardware to
make it, one of the tools we used was Corel
DESIGNER®. I've been a long time user of
CorelDRAW®, but I'm fairly new to Corel
DESIGNER. One of the things that appealed to me
about DESIGNER was that its workspace and
tools were so similar to CorelDRAW. There was
barely any learning curve at all.
I started the project off by taking measurements
of the room that I was going to build my desk for.
Like an architect, I drew out the room in Corel
DESIGNER from the top-down perspective. This is
done by simply using your 'Rectangle Tool'. What
I do is simply create any old rectangle shape.
Then, with the rectangle still selected I type in the
dimensions of that shape or object in the
horizontal and vertical ' Object Size' fields of the
Properties Bar .
Next I measured my existing furniture setup.
Since I came back to work for the family business
after college, I had been using an old drafting
table as a desk. It worked well for all these years
but it wasn't the best use of space, and I was
never able to use it as a drafting table with my
computer, monitor and other equipment and
supplies sitting on top of it.
For this project I even went as far as to draw up
things like my keyboard, monitors, desktop, tablet
and etc. I did this to get a better idea of how
much space I was wasting and what I would need
for the new desk. I was only using about half of
the old drafting table. The other back half of the
desk was unusable and that space was being
wasted. To create the furniture and equipment, I
used the same process that I used to create the
walls in my floor plan. Simply use the ' Rectangle
Tool ', and also the ' Ellipse Tool '. More
complicated shapes can be created by welding
different shapes together using the ' Weld '
command. The button for ' Weld ' will be available
in the ' Properties Bar ' when you have the two
shapes you want to merge selected at the same
time. You can then use your ' Color Palette' to
apply colors to objects and furniture in you floor
plan.
It's worth mentioning at this point, that if you
want to save time drawing individual furnishing
and equipment by hand, Corel DESIGNER also
includes sets of Symbol libraries that let you
quickly drag-and-drop symbols into your designs.
To access the Symbol libraries, go to: Window >
Symbol Manager. The Symbol manager docker
always displays libraries and collections that are
in your local Symbols folder. You can add
collections and libraries to your Symbols folder
from elsewhere on the network and the Symbol
libraries include Architectural, Electrical, General,
Mechanical and Tools and Hands libraries.
And if you are drawing objects that you need to
use in designs on a regular basis, why not save
those objects as symbols or as a custom symbol
library? Just right-click on the object and choose:
Symbol > New Symbol. To save multiple objects
on a page as a Corel Symbol Library (*.CSL), go
to the Symbol Manager docker with your current
file selected, and click on " Export Library ".
So the next step was to show how the room
would look with the furniture rearrange so that I
had a good idea of what type of space I had for
this new "command center".
Now it was time to lay out the basic shape of the
new desk. I used the quick little drawings of my
equipment to help with this process, but I still
kept in mind that I would on day upgrade it all so
I needed to compensate for that. I started by
drawing the desk from above. Two rectangles the
perfect size for my work area were created then
welded together using the "Weld" command.
I then drew the top shelves that would hold my
paperwork, and the upper most shelve that would
hold my two monitors. I planned on running a
bunch of cords to connect things like my
monitors, keyboard, mouse, phone and speakers
to a power strip and also to my computer. So I
drew up a hole in those shelves big enough for all
those cords to run through.
The next step was to take the drawings of the
equipment, like the computer, monitors, keyboards
and etc, I used earlier on in this process, to test if
my new desk's dimensions were going work.