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Xara - Illustration software


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Hi. A friend and I are getting ready to start making logos for our "beer league" football and dodgeball teams, as well as for our own personal enjoyment. I'm not a pro, so I'm not going to purchase AI, but I've researched a bit and came accross a program called "Xara X1."

The price is right for us, but I was wondering if any of the pro's on this board (or experienced amateurs) had any opinions or experience with this software.

I'm thinking we'll be doing a lot of tracing, font / word manipulation, and making vectors (for t-shirts and such.)

Mod's - feel free to move this if it isn't in the right spot, I wanted to get a lot of views.

"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."

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In looking more in detail at Xara, it seems to be a fairly good deal. I'd be open to trying it myself, but they don't have a Mac version, which highly irritates me. I'd maybe try the trial before committing to buying anything, but it looks interesting, nonetheless.

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Thanks, Nitro.

I just found out my roomate has Photoshop 6.0 on his PC. I may play around with that as well as the trial of Xara. I know some of you guys have made some pretty slick logos with Photoshop, but from what I've read you don't have as much flexibility as far as drawing or tracing, or manipulating wordmarks and such. I could be very wrong, though.

"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."

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Sodipodi is a free vector editing program. You can't beat that price I doubt. I played around w/ it a for a few minutes one time and it wasn't too bad....for being free.

Check out the details at:

Sodipodi

Download the Windows version of the prog at:

Sodipodi Download

Edit: I added the direct link to the download page.

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Thanks, Nitro.

I just found out my roomate has Photoshop 6.0 on his PC. I may play around with that as well as the trial of Xara. I know some of you guys have made some pretty slick logos with Photoshop, but from what I've read you don't have as much flexibility as far as drawing or tracing, or manipulating wordmarks and such. I could be very wrong, though.

And photoshop isnt vector... fun program though...I'll have to see if I can locate my old photo manips... was making superheros out of celebrities...lol... i used to use photoshop for everything including logos... even when i first got illustrator... that was a scary journey into AI...

GDB... Brothers from other Mothers

www.pifflespodcast.com

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Thanks, GMac. I was just brushing up on the FAQ, and read the line about how you can export vectors from PS into AI, but they don't maintain their colors or effects. I guess that defeats the purpose for us.

Thanks also, Tez. I'll look into it. I also tried inkscape, but didn't find it to be very stable or user friendly.

"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."

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Sodipodi is a free vector editing program. You can't beat that price I doubt. I played around w/ it a for a few minutes one time and it wasn't too bad....for being free.

Check out the details at:

Sodipodi

Download the Windows version of the prog at:

Sodipodi Download

Edit: I added the direct link to the download page.

As long as you're mentioning free vector software, there's also Inkscape... just FYI.

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Ive been using Xara X for sometime now. I gotta say its pretty Awesome! It does alot of stuff Corel And Illustrator cannot do....Well Corel 12 and Illust.CS have upgraded because of it. All rendering such as Drop shadows, bevels, outlines are rendered INSTANTLY in real time unlike the Corel version of having to manually enter values. It also alows you to perform outlines, shadows,bevels etc while the text fields are still active. So you can just highlight the texts with all the effects and retype while keeping all the effectss....realtime. Its Great! HOnestly Wise investment if you ask me. Although I do tend to do all my outline tracing in Illustrator, but import them into XARA for final touchups and BITMAP exporting.....I LOVE IT!!! ONE PROBLEM WITH IT....If you are working with lots of DATA(heavy files of like over 25-50MB)save your work often...Youll start seeing it crash. THE WINDOWS NIGHTMARE!!!

MAC renders much faster thats for sure. And Exporting EPS sucks inless you are using the latest X2 with ILLUST.CS or COREL 12. Over all its probably best used for exporting for web....theres tons of web tools and batch exporting features!

XARA used to be corelXARA. I actually am part of their Affiliate program and have even made a little money from sending customers(be it a tiny percentage).

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