Charles, I'd reccomend to you Illustrator or Freehand (my preference) if you feel comfortable working Belzier curves. The result will be an encapsulated postscript file which can be scaled and applied to a tremendous variety of sizes and formats.
I've created images that I want to put into our company docs - however when I export them into pagemaker - they go all blockly - do I need to make the original bigger?
Well if you already have Adobe Illustrator then that's what I'd use. If not it'll cost you $499 for Illustrator CS.
If not and you need a bargain product you might also want to try Xara X. It's a cheaper vector/bitmap art program and pretty good at logo stuff. It's only for PC these days though it used to be on Macs. It's about $180. You can download a demo from here: http://www.xara.com/products/xarax/
Also there is the whole Corel Draw crowd out there. It's actually been pretty good since release 11. V. 12 costs $399 and they don't make it for Mac since v. 11. But you do get a photo bitmap program and a flash like vector animation program along with it. http://www.corel.com
Don't forget the former industry standard Macromedia Free Hand MX. $399 available for Mac and Windows http://www.macromedia.com
If you decide to go for Macromedia Freehand and you need any advice/assistance, feel free to drop me a line and I'll try and help you out. I've been using the application since version 3.1, and the current MX version is a fancy name for version 11, so you could say I'm an Oldhand with Freehand...
I'd say that 99% of comic books are lettered using Illustrator these days, incidentally, and I'm the 1% using Freehand. I like to be different
I've created images that I want to put into our company docs - however when I export them into pagemaker - they go all blockly - do I need to make the original bigger?
It sounds as if you could be bringing the images into Pagemaker at a size which exceeds that of the image's original size. The way round this would be to create the image as a vector illustration, or if it's something like a photograph then, as you've correctly surmised, make the original larger.
I love Illustrator, live and die by it. Can't stand CorelDraw, it's too limited in what it can do in my opinion(same with CorelPhotoPaint, I much rather prefer Photoshop).
V. 12 costs $399 and they don't make it for Mac since v. 11. But you do get a photo bitmap program and a flash like vector animation program along with it.
