Serif DrawPlus SE Review

Pros

• Effects palette offers quick and easy options to enhance the appearance of shapes
• Gallery palette contains a wide range of categorized clip art suitable for many occasions

Cons

• Some Effects appear a little tacky
• No plug ins system to extend the application, such as in Inkscape

Serif DrawPlus SE offers a few features that can help users take basic illustrations to a new level and which are suitable to help even novice users.

The Effects tab offers a selection of options in different categories, such as Animals, Stone, Wood and Glass. These offer a very quick and easy way to change the visual appearance of items within an illustration. Used wisely, they can be a real time saver, however, some of the effects do produce rather tacky results. Users should exercise some discretion to ensure their work doesn't become one big mass of eye candy.

Another potential time saver is the Gallery tab, which is essentially a categorized library of clip art built into DrawPlus SE. Again, caution should always be exercised when using clip art within designs, as a piece can quickly include graphics of very different styles. However, used with care, this feature could help out in all sorts of designs and save the inevitable regular trips to the internet to source suitable graphics.

Pros

• Some very intuitive text control
• Multiple pages can be added to a document

Cons

• Kerning control is quite imprecise
• Limited control of text on a curve

DrawPlus SE is a vector-based graphics editor and so isn't really designed to be used for page layout, however there are cases when it makes sense to produce complete designs in vector editors--such as posters with limited text. DrawPlus SE is a bit of a mixed bag when used in this way, but overall copes well enough to save occasional trips to a desktop publishing application.

The ability to add multiple pages to a single document can be very useful, such as when working on double sided projects, and this isn't generally a common feature in this type of software. This doesn't, however, mean that DrawPlus SE can stand as an alternative to your favorite desktop publishing package. Overall, text control is too limited for such purposes, though the control that is available is very intuitive.

You can use grab handles to drag and adjust leading and also word wrapping. This approach is also applied to individual letters within editable text meaning that you can just drag letters to adjust the kerning. Unfortunately, this isn't a very precise way to edit kerning, but this method also allows you to rotate individual letters while keeping text editable, which can be useful. You can't use this technique on text that has been applied to a curve, though, and the kerning in such text can quickly become messy if the curve is edited, making the Curve Text Wizard quite impractical in some cases.

DrawPlus SE uses its own proprietary .DPP file format for saving files, though it does offer the limited options of exporting to JPEG, GIF and PNG, which could then be used within other software packages. The File menu does display a Publish as PDF command, but this has been disabled and requires an upgrade to activate this option.

Conclusion

Serif DrawPlus SE is one of relatively few free vector-based graphics editors and so doesn't face too much competition. As a vector-based graphics editor it does a lot of things well including:

• Well-executed user interface
• Easily accessed help information
• Reasonable range of effects and gallery objects
• Multiple pages in individual documents

On the flip side, there are some aspects that detract from the user experience, such as:

• Disabled features are not clearly indicated
• No keyboard shortcuts for the tools palette
• Imprecise kerning control
• No plug-ins system

The main competitor to DrawPlus SE as a free vector-based graphics editor is the open source Inkscape project. I'm a big fan of Inkscape and for me it would be an easy decision to choose Inkscape over DrawPlus SE. However, Inkscape is being developed as a free alternative to Adobe Illustrator and, despite a good user interface, may seem a little intimidating to new users.

For me, the biggest problem with DrawPlus SE is the disabled features that permeate the user interface, with no visual cue to let you know they are disabled until they have been clicked. However, I'm sure that regular users would quickly learn which features should be ignored and so, even with this niggle, I have no doubt that there will many users who will find DrawPlus SE a more inviting package and easier to jump into than Inkscape.

It will arguably be a better option for most home users looking for a package that allows them to produce bits and pieces for themselves, such as invitations and greeting cards. Accordingly, I've rated the application in terms of use by home users, rather than semi-professional designers.

Serif DrawPlus SE can be downloaded for free from the Free Serif Software website.