Xara started out decades ago as one of the least expensive and most flexible and intuitive vector drawing apps on the PC platform.

After a few years of obscurity, it was purchased by Corel and much of the vector handling UI was incorporated into Corel Draw, then a much better tool than Illustrator of that day.

Years later, Corel bit off more than it could chew, and Xara reverted to its UK developers, where it resumed evolution as a simple but powerful vector (and now also bitmap) editor, still very inexpensive compared to the Adobe competitors).

Somewhere around Illustrator 7.0, the Adobe apps began to improve significantly in power and usability, and I found myself gravitating to Illustrator. Over the next few years, Adobe's newly acquired Dreamweaver web designer became the most powerful, and then the most complicated. In response, Adobe released Muse, which started out very slowly and gradually became fully useful, but by now also rather complicated, and then Adobe recently gave up on competing with its own power-designer Dreamweaver.

Meanwhile, back in the UK, Xara developed a significant capability for generating web pages without the user having to know anything at all about web design. At the same time, Xara continued evolving as a very powerful and intuitive vector designer, now with many surprisingly Photoshop-like features.

A few years ago, Magix acquired Xara and added it to a diverse collection of graphics apps in several areas, and now offers a dizzying array of apps, including Xara. Amazingly, Xara has STILL continued to refine itself, and may now be the simplest and most approachable way to design a web page from scratch without touching any HTML. Just design anything that looks like a web page, as you might mock one up in Corel Draw from 1998 or Illustrator CC 2019, and output the design to a folder on your computer. Upload the contents of that folder to a web-hosting service, and you have an instant functional web page.

Of course, that assumes you have an FTP app that can talk to your domain hosting service, but if you're doing web design that's a minimum requirement. Xara can automate a lot more of the process for you, if you tell it your login credentials, etc. Xara also has a large library of "web objects" that can be dragged into your drawing (for video, email, picture galleries, etc.), but some of these are a little unconventional, as they come from various third party origins. And, as with any web design, you can make things increasingly complicated, until Xara is no longer an appropriate development tool, and you will have to graduate to something much more powerful, like Dreamweaver (which is still king of the mountain).

Meanwhile, Xara remains a very fast, stable, and accessible vector & bitmap design environment. Like any do-everything graphics toolset, it takes some time to get used to it, and to discover all the power features, but it's worth the trouble, because this program has been improving for literally decades, and has become a solid platform for very flexible and advanced design work. In fact, the web design aspects are just icing on an already massive cake.

I've knocked off one star in this review because I'm not happy with the "dizzying array" of Magix products that Xara is now a part of. The products may all be great, but to a new user, it's impossible to figure out what's what. Also, since Magix has acquired several other well respected tools (like the Sony's Sound Forge), they seem to have merged all the licensing details into one list -- showing that I now own about 30 of their products (most of which are just upgrades), all of which were "registered" on the same date! So I wasted 5 minutes just trying to figure out if Designer Pro X11 was newer than Designer Pro X (it's not, even though the install folder on my PC is newer!). This kind of confusion -- for new users and long-time users -- is unfortunate, and doesn't inspire confidence in Magix.

That said, I'm still very confident in Xara, and about a dozen of my clients rely on it for medium-complex websites that can be maintained with (for most of them) zero input from a web consultant.

Please note that this review is for Xara, and not for any of the many other Magix apps, which come from a variety of sources. It appears that Magix has been acquiring mainly excellent apps with strong reputations, but I haven't surveyed their whole product line, so I can't comment on them.

This review is written from the perspective of a web developer who is not a graphic artist or designer. Xara Designer Pro X has a number of sophisticated features that may be useful to professional designers, but are beyond my skill level. I use the program for relatively simple tasks: creating backgrounds, modifying existing graphics, creating buttons, highlights, bullets, image frames, shadows, transparency, styled text, simple banner ads, etc.

The nice thing about Xara Designer Pro X is that it can be immediately useful to people who do not use graphics programs on a daily basis. The learning curve is very gentle with this product. There are a large number of short video tutorials that provide understandable instructions for using the product. The program includes many templates, images, and components that a beginner can use as the start of a design. For instance, creating buttons for web sites is very quick and easy using the many button images provided. The same goes for backgrounds, text boxes, icons, and many other elements contained in the program's design gallery.

While I've only needed to use the support desk once (an installation issue), the reply was quick and detailed, and the customer service rep followed up the next day to ensure the problem was solved for me. The Xara forum has an active membership with some truly talented moderators, including Gary Bouton who wrote Xara Xtreme 5: The Official Guide , a very fine book on one of the previous versions of this software. For the most part, the book is still quite relevant for non-designers because many of the program's basic tools are still very similar to the tools discussed in the book.

One of the very intersting aspects of Xara Designer Pro X is its vector orientation. In my own opinion, vector images tend to favor people with limited graphic art skills. It is easy to resize images without affecting quality, and changing colors is a snap. Manipulating images, such as changing size and shape, or combining several images, are very simple operations with this tool. Changing transparency, adding drop shadows, and working with text are also easy to understand and easy to accomplish. Using the short online videos to refresh your knowledge of the program's many tools is very helpful to me when I am unsure about using a tool properly. Finally, the undo feature allows me to back out of hopeless situations one step at a time.

The web design feature will not be useful to professional designers, since the program does not include code editing capabilities, but for someone desiring to design an attractive web site for a small business or organization, it would definitely fill the need. There are several dozen web site templates available within the design gallery, so someone could generate a simple web site very quickly by substituting text and images specific to the designers business or organization.

The program also provides basic tools for working with photos, although I have not used them to any great extent.

There are three things I like most about this software:

The functionality - It easily does everything I need to do on a regular basis, yet provides the advanced tools to delve into more detailed work when I want to spend the time to learn more.

The simplicity - Xara Designer Pro X is a very straightforward program for doing basic graphic operations.

The learning tools - The program provides videos, a manual, and excellent help. The Xara forum is a very helpful place, and quite friendly to beginners.

The price - Xara Designer Pro X is a very useful graphics package for $299. Xara also has two other products that are subsets of this program. They are priced very moderately, and may be just as useful to beginners. These two programs are: MAGIX Photo & Graphic Designer 2013 [Download ] and Xara Web Designer MX Premium [Download ].

Overall, if someone were looking for more functionality than the basic graphics programs available on the market, this would be an excellent choice, especially when budget or skill levels are limited. With a little practice, almost anyone could learn the basics of using this program without requiring formal (paid) training. For someone developing or maintaining his or her own web site, with the various simple graphics requirements involved, this program would be extremely useful and cost-effective.

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We use Xara Designer Pro as a book layout and cover-art tool. For page layout, it beats Illustrator and Photoshop - but also beats InDesign. We still use Photoshop for text styles and background eraser tool - as those two things don't really exist very well in Xara. Even though Xara can do PDF combines, etc. - we still combine our PDF documents in Acrobat Pro, as well as do PDFX conversions. The new Xara Designer Pro 9 has the ability to export PDFX files, but I have had trouble getting our printer to accept the files. Therefore, we always export PDF-A from Xara and then convert to PDF-X from within Acrobat.

Overall, it's a very nice piece of software, and a must for any graphics or layout artist.

An excellent vector design software suite that covers everything from vector design to photo manipulation, web design and simple DTP work. The program is intuitive and the documentation well laid out and well written. I upgraded from a previous license. i immediately received a download and the hardcopy was with me in a few days (cd and physical book).

I am not giving it 5 stars only because it doesn't do automatic page numbering for DTP purposes, but if that's not your concern, consider it a 5 star product. There is also a helpful community of designers using it.
it's an amazing software that does anything much more expensive suites do at a fraction of the cost.