Coreldraw has a long history as a drawing tool, having been around for nearly 20 years.

It's aimed primarily at illustrators, but it's easy enough to use that home users can easily get good results from it. We looked at Coreldraw X4 in conjunction with a Wacom Graphire graphics tablet, which proved to be excellent at making the most of the program.

As it's designed around illustration rather than photo editing, you need to be fairly comfortable with drawing – since drawing on screen with a mouse isn't a good way of working, we found the tablet to be an excellent way to interact with the program. There are several tutorials on the DVD along with a stack of step-by-step PDFs that are installed with the program.

They're easy enough to follow, so much so that even our butter-fingers were able to produce reasonable-looking results within a few minutes. It's much easier to follow than most professional design programs. Coreldraw's historical strength has been that it can also be used for page design, so if you're making a newsletter, you can do it all in the one program.

Admittedly, this is more fiddly than in a dedicated desktop publishing program, but the features are there.
Being a "suite" it does come with Corel's Photopaint software for working with digital photographs. The design of this is very similar to that of Coreldraw, so if you're not already tied to a photo-editing program, this would make a good bundle.

There are clever new features, such as the ability to import a picture of some text and have the program try to figure out what fonts are used, as well as an improved tracer that converts standard images and photographs into the drawings that Coreldraw uses.

It's true that Coreldraw X4 is very expensive from the point of view of a home user, primarily because it's designed for professional users. It's very easy to use and, if you have an older version of certain Corel software, you may qualify for a cheaper upgrade (there's a list on the Corel website).

In addition, students (not just design students) qualify for a much cheaper version, so this could be a particularly useful package if you're setting off for university and will need to design things.