Design your desk by Joseph Diaz

e 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 maurniture 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 theProperties 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 managerdocker 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.ke it, one of the tools we used was Corel DESIGN