Review by Shala Kerrigan

I’m an illustrator who works primarily in vector format and CorelDRAW is one of my favorite programs for it.nSo first the cons-nSupport, documentation and user guides for Corel products can be iffy. If you’re just starting out, and want to learn to use the program, by all means, read the user guide, help files and do the new user tour- but you’ll learn a lot more about what the programs can do by looking for online tutorials and playing with the program.

So the pros-nIt’s really intuitive. When you’re starting, and facing all those options, it can be a bit intimidating, but if you’ve used any kind of vector software in the past, it’s easy to figure out.nThe tools are great. I’m loving the improved knife tool and the fountain fills are a lot more adjustable and easier to use than X7 for beautiful ombre and shaded effects.nSo far, this has been running really well on my system. No crashes or freezes even with a lot of nodes and fill styles.

I love CorelDRAW. You can save in SVG format for plotters and cutters, you can trace bitmaps to create vector shapes and reduce the number of nodes or merge shapes easily. It does everything that more expensive programs do, and does it in a very user friendly way.