This will be a bit of a rant but I will try to spare you the raving
My story is that I was reluctant to upgrade my version of Designer Pro 7 to a more current version of Designer Pro.
It is just that personally I have no need for the web design features.
My Photo & Graphic Designer version was at 8.
Then the upgrade offer came for PGD 15. I was more than pleasantly surprised that all prepress features made their way into PGD a wise decision by XARA/Magix and that was the top incentive for my upgrade.
While I can relate to designers using several applications, I much prefer to be able to accomplish a large variety of tasks in just one application. Lately, I did a lot of testing and running trial versions of several programs. For example Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer: Quite impressive what Serif came up with, beautiful interface including an option for a light-coloured UI in the latest version. I found the interface well-structured, and yes, although developed from scratch, the interfaces cannot hide their Serif Plus product range ancestry. That may be a good thing and I dont see while Serif Plus range users should feel deserted much longer. On the flip side I found Affinitys offerings too resource-hungry and missing features that are essential for my work. I am also not a fan of the layer/artboard logic in Affinity Designer.
Next test drive was the CorelDraw Suite, not the very latest version 2017, but Version X8. While Corel remains an impressive set of tools and features in my book, I experienced severe performance issues with their newer versions. (So, I will stick with my version X6 for accessing older files)
So, PGD 15 is the clear winner for all the good reasons such as performance, intuitive interface and tool sets, convenience, and now prepress features from the Pro Version as well. I am glad to have an up-to-date application for the vast majority of my design tasks once again. And then there is that Xara-factor which is hard to define. Like looking forward to a working session, which I do not have with other design application much.
Axel
Germany
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