good drawing tools

Hi everyone. I'm new to web graphic design and trying to choose a graphical package (or more if necessary) to use. My first experience making a button using PSP 9 just isn't exciting. I made a simple retangular button with rounded corners and with 10 pt. label in Arial font. It looks very poor when it shows up in a web page. What other packages should I give them a shot for simple graphics?

It may be because your showing it too large in the webpage, or you are exporting it as a .gif when it has many colours.

Try Macromedia Fireworks that is my main program for web design.

You may also want to try Illustrator or Photoshop or both.

They are quite expensive but worth the price.

Photoshop has all sorts of bevel, emboss etc. filters for making great buttons.

D

I would have used a larger font anyway; 10pt doesn't resolve as well in graphic form as it does pure text in a text editor, or a wysiwyg web-page producer. The graphic form takes some of the 'edge' off of the image resulting in poor rendering.

PhotoShop CS (or CS2 now) comes bundled with ImageReady.
PhotoShop is the be-all and end-all for web illustration.
I agree with Sypher that Fireworks is good, I used to use it myself as well.
But when I tried PhotoShop 8 (CS) (and ImageReady), I found it gives you a whole new dimension.

IR is more geared to vector graphics than PS, but you can use it to animate your images. That means separate frames; that means you can assign commands to each frame; that means you have enormous potential for your graphics. Much much more than mere buttons.

It isn't all good news. The more your put into a thing, the greater the filesize. So you have to achieve a workable balance with what you choose to do with it.

There's more good news though... and something that not many people know; You can get it to produce all the finished html or CSS and javascript (where necessary) to publish your finished design as a final web page, or edit it into the code for an existing / larger web page (ideal for larger filesize images), or slice it all up to reduce the size on your page.
The only thing PhotoShop won't do to make you love it even more, is bring you breakfast in bed, on a Sunday morning wearing a french maid's outfit, or clean your socks!

[edit: As with any graphics programme, I have begun to find that "less" is often "more". Point to bear in mind, before you splash out on one with more 'bells and whistles' than you might need.]