What do you like best about Xara Designer Pro X?

[gwpriester]

Chris Dickman, who runs www.Graphics.com and who makes galleries available for Xara art and a lot more, wants to publish a review of Xara Designer Pro X. But instead of the usual review, Chris thinks it might be better to let the users (that's us) tell the story.

So, if you'd like to participate, and help publicize the world's greatest graphics application, respond and list two or three things you really like about Xara Designer Pro X. If you want to compare it favorably to Illustrator or CorelDRAW, I think that would be OK.

So I'll start off.

I've been a Xara users since 1996. I use Xara Designer Pro X for everything I do with the exception of converting bitmaps to grayscale and CMYK. My primary uses are graphics and website design, which I do entirely in Designer Pro X. This includes all site graphics, all photo editing, web site design, and publishing the sites directly to the web. I also create 3D stereograms for books and magazines. I do everything except the actual compilation of the stereograms in Designer Pro X. I cannot think of a better application for graphic designers, and website designers.

One of the new features/tools that I use almost every day for my stereogram work is the Color Select Erase Tool. It lets me select a color or range of colors in a bitmap and either modify that selection with various Photoshop compatible filters, or erase the selected colors. You can add to the range or colors or select more than one color at a time. For me I use this to drop out the background on overlay images. The tool is not new to photo editing applications, but in a vector drawing application it's a breakthrough.

[Gare]

Thanks, Gary.

I think Chris Dickman would be most appreciative if you pointed out how useful you find a new feature specific to this version, to help him differentiate in his review between the latest rev and previous versions.

For example:

Xara has always been terrific for graphics-rich short desktop publishing documents, but now with Paragraph Styles, XDP X is a hands-down winner at my shop for easily and quickly providing text consistency between pages. Styles are as easy to define as they are to use.

..or something like this. Probably less "sell-y".

My Best,

Gary

[steve.ledger]

Xara Designer Pro X is my one stop graphics workshop for my design, illustration, raster and vector editing requirements.
I use it several times each day for various tasks such PDF editing, photo editing, graphic design, tutorials and troubleshooting support for forum members.
Although I don't make full use of Designer Pro's animation tool set I have found it very useful for creating custom scrolling ending credits for my personal video compilations.
The shallow learning curve, the smooth and fluid manner in which everything works makes using Designer Pro X a pleasing experience.
It's easy to forget its the worlds fastest graphics program ...until you try something else!

[angelize]

My husband and I run a small publication and we have been using Designer pro since version 3.2 (when it was Xtreme Pro) on a daily basis. We use it for layout and design of both the publication pages and the ads, photo editing, and I use it for website design, and other graphic design services that I provide my clients. I do use it in conjunction with other programs and plugins at times but I would say that most of what I do I do with Xara. One of the things that initially attracted me to Xara products was ease of use, my husband has a hard time learning new programs and techniques particularly if they are complicated so Xara was perfect for us. And the new shapebuilder and eraser tools in the latest version, Designer Pro X, really come in handy for a lot of the tasks I do. I would highly recommend it to any one!

[Rik]

It's not just Designer Pro X.
It's been every version that I've tried - X1, Xtreme, Designer Pro etc...


The 'Shape Tool' is the single most important feature (tool) that has allowed an amateur like me to achieve some pretty decent results.

The Pros and Xperts will have their own views opinions, but for me, without this tool, I would be at the same stage I am with Illustrator. Nowhere.

[DimitriBreivik]

I'm a complete Graphic Design novice, and used to have Corel products installed on my pc. I never really developed a passion for graphic design until I started using Xara Designer Pro, though. It is just so much more intuitive to use, it really makes the learning process feel natural. Since I started using Xara I have even decided applying to a Graphical College here in Amsterdam! (the Rietveld)

[chris-dickman]

Gary, thanks, actually comments about favorite features in the new version, or specific features in all versions, or simply overall statements about why Xara is the tool of choice, would be fine. The idea is to provide a broad portrait, from a user perspective. And this can be in contrast with competing products or not. As long as comments are grounded in personal usage and so transcend a marketing perspective. We know why we think Xara is great -- but not enough other members of the graphic and design community do. I'd like to encourage them to give the trial version a spin, and user comments are very powerful in this regard. So, thanks to all for your commments.

Chris

Thanks, Gary.

I think Chris Dickman would be most appreciative if you pointed out how useful you find a new feature specific to this version, to help him differentiate in his review between the latest rev and previous versions.

For example:

Xara has always been terrific for graphics-rich short desktop publishing documents, but now with Paragraph Styles, XDP X is a hands-down winner at my shop for easily and quickly providing text consistency between pages. Styles are as easy to define as they are to use.

..or something like this. Probably less "sell-y".

My Best,

Gary

[Karateed]

I'm a hobbyist with Xara but my use of it came early on with Webstyle....I tinkered with that and found it easy at first to create webdesigns. I've been purchasing Xara since Xtreme because of ease of use. My graphic side got 'bugged' when tutorials offered on this site and others which proved I could use Xara easily to do different kinds of drawings.....ease of use of it's functions is what attracted me....I've built a few web pages, mostly for my wife, again ease of use and quick creation of said websites.

[KultiVator]

I love the speed of use and the fact that you can wade into Xara at your own pace... e.g. use just the toolbars initially, until you feel confident enough to start using the many UI tricks and keyboard shortcuts to achieve more drawing in less time.

It's not just that Xara is fast - it also gives more and better feedback as you manipulate your images and objects - all in real-time (other than some of the more demanding Photoshop plug-ins - which are not really the core of what Xara is about, so this does not detract in any way from the speed and convenience of the overall design workflow).

The text handling tools have matured well over the past couple of years - now supporting some really useful capabilities, including advanced layouts, multi-tiered bullets / lists / numbering, automatic flow between 'linked' text panels, embeddable graphics that remain anchored at a specific position in a paragraph even as your text continues to evolve.

Xara really is a one-stop shop for almost every graphical need, from fine art, to vector illustration, to data visualisation, to photo manipulation, newsletter construction, application UI wire-framing and web design.

Topping it all off, Xara is great fun to use and any time I fire it up it becomes the highlight of my working day!

[Gare]

What attracts me the most to Xara Designer Pro X isn’t a feature or a new tool, but instead the way everything works together in this latest iteration. I feel as though a level of maturity has arrived with this version. Previous versions introduced some bitmap editing features here, and a desktop publishing feature there—the Xara Group can make the claim that you don’t need a suite of applications for intermediate to advanced tasks anymore—the goods are right here in one single integrated interface.

It’s not “a little of this and a little of that”; the tools are there for doing what many graphics professionals need, and they’re simple and straightforward enough for a novice to get down to productivity almost immediately.

It’s a tidy little Triple Threat. You have features for basic image retouching, a desktop publishing environment that’s the friendliest I’ve ever experienced, and a complement of drawing tools that almost explain themselves. If you want to get into visual communications today, you might run out of ideas before you run out of features in Xara Designer Pro X.



-g