Serif's DrawPlus has developed from a rather basic vector drawing program to become the leading product of its type for under £100. The latest incarnation, version 6, adds extra features and improves the working environment, so DrawPlus now sits with applications costing much more.
It still focuses on ease of use and is designed as much for the beginner with little artistic training as it is for the seasoned professional. Even a full-time graphic artist may find its quick and flexible approach suitable for some projects.
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Draw and Design consists of DrawPlus 6 on CD, together with a second resource CD full of extra design Wizards, tutorials and sample drawings, and six further CDs containing 100,000 graphic clips. DrawPlus launches quickly and presents a well-designed interface with the usual elements of a menu bar across the top, toolbox down the left-hand side and a tabbed palette on the right called the Studio.
The Studio can show a variety of palettes, from fills and fonts to line styles, and the Portfolio, an extended clipboard to which you can drag elements from your drawing. The program supports multiple documents, so this is an easy way to move material from one drawing to another. Unfortunately, it's not compatible with the Portfolio in PagePlus, so you can't use it as a shortcut between the two Serif programs.
There's a good range of tools in the DrawPlus toolbox. Many of the icons hide collections of related tools, including line drawing, QuickShapes, connectors and dimensions. The core line drawing tools are for straight lines, curves and freehand, and DrawPlus provides a simple toolbar to change the type of line connection at nodes.
Connectors are ideal for simple diagrams, such as flow charts and organisational structures. As with Visio, once you've connected them to objects, they stay attached, even when you move the objects. Auto-dimensions are also good for diagrams, as they measure horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines automatically and can even mark off angles between lines.
Auto-trace, the ability to automatically draw around the outline of a bitmap to produce vector objects, is a feature long wished for among DrawPlus owners. This is one of the major new additions and it works well.
Serif's Autotrace produces a copy of the original bitmap with each coloured element defined as a separate polygon.
Although the program recommends you keep the polygon count down to around 200, a much larger number is possible - depending on the tolerance and smoothness settings - and can look very close to the original. The traced image is effectively a vector jigsaw, where you can remove or manipulate the pieces.
They tie in well with DrawPlus' extensive range of design wizards. While the drawing style of these pre-designed cards, web furniture and stationery tends towards the cartoon rather than sober business, there's a wide enough choice to satisfy most people.
There's even a Download Time Estimator in the new program to give you an idea of how long a graphic will take to reach a client's browser from your website.
New drawing tools include the ability to take an object or scene and apply perspective, so that all elements are moved and reshaped automatically to appear on a side wall, floor or ceiling. Extra predefined effects, such as glows, bevels and embosses, have been added with good control over levels, widths and other parameters.
Lines and fills have been improved by the addition of non-liner gradient fills, where you can adjust the colours and gradations to suit, and lines that can also take fill effects. Finally, there's the ability to roughen the edges of an object, to provide a less 'scientific' feel to your drawings.
Serif Draw and Design and its underlying DrawPlus 6 application include some useful enhancements. Auto-trace, colour schemes and reversible cropping are particularly welcome, and the introduction of the Portfolio clipboard makes it particularly easy to move page elements between DrawPlus and PagePlus.
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