Serif DrawPlus: Powerful Free Vector Art Program

Being a connoisseur of free and cheap graphics programs, I felt the need to write a review on DrawPlus by Serif, a somewhat well-known company in the United Kingdom which is attempting to compete with the big guys like Adobe and Corel. They have a unique approach to selling their products: when they come out with new versions of their software, they don't retire the old ones - they slash the prices or even offer them for free. The newest will often cost around $100, still cheap compared to those sold by the software giants, while older ones usually slash the price by half or down to a tenth. If you are not too picky about which program you are using and like to play around with vector, or if you just want to make some great designs for a cafepress or zazzle product, then DrawPlus is all you need.

The edition I currently have and will be reviewing is DrawPlus 7, which currently sells for $29.99 plus any applicable tax. I will be explaining in-depth the vector method of drawing since this is for beginners and novices who want to better understand vector. It was bought as a download from Serif's value store and has no manual, so I am writing this based on my tinkering around with this program.

DrawPlus has a fairly plain interface, but with many familiar tools including the ellipse and rectangle, as well as several other 'quickshapes' which you can place and then edit using special built-in 'nodes'. The nodes are used to edit lines, shapes, and curves; they contain the mathematical information of the length of the lines and angles of the curves and corners. This is what allows nondestructive editing of a vector picture and makes vector often better for design than bitmap, which edits individual pixels and paints over them. With a vector program, you can draw a line over another, then move the line around without having any effect on the previous line.

While many vector programs have generally only two or three 'quickshapes' DrawPlus has several besides the ellipse, rectangle and soft rectangle. It also has hearts, stars, arrows, chevrons, clocks, faces, flowers, crescents, and more. These are great for starting out shapes for logo designs, patterns, or charts. These shapes can be resized with no loss of image quality, whether they are kept as quickshapes or converted to curves; that is one of the advantages of vector art.

The drawing tools are located at the left of the screen by default, as is the case of most vector art programs, and the colour palette is located at the right. The drawing tools include the quickshapes, freehand drawing tool, straight segments, curves, resize and rotate, node tool, fill, transparency, dropshadow, roughen, border, text, and some hotspot/slice tools. The freehand tool is used by clicking and dragging with the mouse, or by simply drawing using a tablet and stylus. The straight segments are useful for neat lines, while the benzier and smart curves are meant for 'inking' sketches. They can also be used for drawing smooth curve sketches if hand steadiness is an issue. The fill tool is used for filling with solid colours, gradients, or even textures, and effects can be added from the filters menu, envelopes, drop-shadows(to lift the object off the paper a little), and the transparency tool(which masks off part of a selected object). The roughen tool makes the lines more jagged and can smooth them back down again, since it is only adding or subtracting nodes along the lines and the program remembers the initial smooth shape.

On the right of the screen is the palette with a seemingly limited range of colours. The tint and shade of each colour can be changed, however, and the program remembers the neutral or 'zero' point. This colour method has been used in many vector programs including Corel Draw and the Microsoft Works Draw program for the word processor, and the effects are not permanent. It is similar to using dodge and burn in a bitmap program.

The line tab has several line styles including abstract weaves and shapes for fancy layouts or cards. You can make your own linestyle by simply placing one or more quickshapes or other objects onto the screen selecting them, and then pressing the '+' button at the top right of the brushes box. The same thing goes with all the palettes, including the colours and fills(gradients). With the gradients, DrawPlus goes beyond the elliptical and linear, and even has plasma and bitmaps, and even meshes. Notable industry standard Adobe Illustrator CS 3 does not have such a readily available plasma gradient, an advantage for Serif. Gradient meshes allow the user to change patches of colour in a specific part of the shape, and make some eye-catching gradient effects. On top of that is the transparency palette, which includes gradients and even bitmaps, and those are basically custom transparency masks, ranging from the completely opaque black areas to the transparent white areas. The only flaw I see is the inabiltiy to make your own mesh or other type of special gradient without selecting one from the palette and tinkering with it. Still, it isn't much of a problem.

The schemes tab just shows some different colour schemes that you can select to go along with the main palette, and those can be useful if you want to have a set of colours that you know go well together. In the gallery, there are many shape wizards, which give the user the ability to customize them. I have not found any options to make your own wizards, but in general with the functionality of DrawPlus, you may not need them. A right-click on any filled shape can give you many choices, including to filter effects and instant3D, which both can make some great bevel graphics. Try them both and see what you can come up with, and play around with the 3D and 2D bumpmap effects to create some great textures. The effects can be stored in the effects tab, which is yet another great customizable palette DrawPlus has to offer.

Portfolio is basically the Serif equivilent of the symbols tab of Flash and Illustrator, allowing you to place objects you created into it for later use. DrawPlus 7 does not have the fancier symbol sprayer or mass-manipulator tools, but with every vector program there is a trade-off, and Serif may have improved the symbol tools in later versions. At least even in an older version like this, it shows the symbol folders which is more convenient than the 'open library' function in some of the other vector programs from Adobe. The font viewer is also very useful and less clunky than the Illustrator drop-down lists that either take forever to load or don't show the fonts. The node editor even allows you to move individual letters around, rotate, and resize them, as well as apply various stretch envelopes. Illustrator is a great program, but even the industry standards have their limitations.

DrawPlus has some other goodies, including Autotrace, which can be used to convert bitmap pictures into vector, a good zoom function which involves clicking on a + or - button rather than clicking on a magnifying glass and pointing it at a certain area, which can lead to accidental zoom-ins or outs. The click and drag zoom is useful at times though it is easy to inadvertently double-click an area and then wonder what you did. There are also some buttons for web objects if you wish to make a fireworks-style webpage with hotspots and image slices, a button that looks like an eye and toggles 'hide studio' on and off, and a page-manager, which allows you to add pages to your file much like in Illustrator.

At the top are tools such as the effects paster, which can paste styles and other effects do different objects, and can even paste font and colour settings to text. Among the other buttons are undo and redo(arrow buttons), the flip buttons which are represented by triangles with arrows on them, one of them lighter to show the object's old and new directions, level-switching buttons(bring up, down, to front, or to back), and several combine, group, crop, add, and subtract buttons. The shadow and envelope buttons are also present, as are perspective warps and curves, but strangely, the align function is in a window much like the effects. The transform and replicate wizards are also worth looking at and playing around with in the Tools window.

Now for copying and resizing. Some of the ways the tools work are a little different - for example, with most programs like Illustrator, you press