Xara Designer Pro X9 First Look by Gary W Priester

FIRST LOOK By Gary W. Priester

The wait is finally over. Xara Designer Pro X9 is here! As you can see by the box photos below, what we once just called Xara has grown into a suite of four Xaras. I have covered the first three products in the suite in my previous First Looks. In this review we will look at Xara Designer Pro X9, the crème de la crème, the bees knees, the big kahuna, the top of the line, in short, the best of the best!

For those of you who may not be familiar with the family of Xara products, here’s a quick summary:

Download Your Free Trial Copy Today!

Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 9 is ideal for photo editing and illustration with a good assortment of drawing, photo, text, and design tools. Click here for more.

Xara Web Designer 9 (Classic and Premium) is perfect for serious website design. Classic is the entry level version while Premium contains all of the high end web design and text features. Click here for more.

Xara Page & Layout Designer 9 is the third product in the suite and is the right product for those who work primarily in printed output including ads, brochures, logo design, posters, newsletters. It also has the ability to create powerful web documents. Click here for more.

Xara Designer Pro X9 contains all the features from the all three products and is in my humble opinion, the best design solution going. Of course I am prejudiced, I have been using Xara products since 1996 for all my design and website work.

Xara Designer Pro X9 - First Look by Gary W. Priester

Before We Start

There are a few announcements I want to make before I launch into the product review. Xara Designer Pro X9 comes in both a 32 and 64-bit version. You can download and use both. You need a 64-bit copy of Windows 7 or Windows 8 to take advantage of the 64-bit environment. The primary benefit of 64-bit support is access to more system memory, which means you will be able to work with more photos in your documents and web pages without experiencing the ominous Out of Memory! warning. I should point out, most 32-bit Photoshop compatible filters do not work with the 64-bit version. However, they work splendidly with the 32-bit version. This is why you should install both versions. And why not, buy the 64-bit and get the 32-bit version free! (Or vice versa). Since Xara Designer Pro X9 contains the best tools and features of the other products in the suite, I have divided my review into sections that correspond to the existing products. Use the links shown above to get more in depth information on each product. For the sake of brevity, I am going to cover the basics and link to existing reviews for details. Finally, this entire review was produced and published entirely in Xara Designer Pro X9.

TO THE TOP