Create Beautiful Bevels Fast with CorelDRAW

By Steve Bain

Applying bevels to graphics with older versions of CorelDRAW® was certainly not simple and easy, and the results were arguably less than impressive. However, all that changed with the introduction of the bevel effects in version X3. In recent versions of the program, you can now add a third dimension (see below) and customize your bevels with depth, color, and lighting options.

 

Finding Gold in the New CGS Digital Content Collection

By Steve Bain

As loyal users have come to expect, the CorelDRAW Graphics Suite comes with a substantial stockpile of digital content that you can use and abuse as you see fit. What you may not realize is that when version X3 was released Corel revamped the entire collection. It isn’t just a few new fonts and images added for good marketing, it’s a complete overhaul. Browse through these highlights and you’ll see what I mean.

Draw Smarter with This Clever CorelDRAW Tool

By Steve Bain

Has anyone ever known you well enough to finish your sentences? Well, that’s sort of how one of the most intuitive drawing tools in CorelDRAW works. The Smart Drawing tool was first introduced in CorelDRAW 12 to give freehand sketching the benefit of a kind of artificial intelligence. You can sketch a shape freehand-style on screen and end up with a precise vector object as a curve, native object or Perfect Shape.

You’ll find the Smart Drawing tool (shown below) located in the Toolbox between the curve tools and the rectangle tools—or you can press the S hotkey for speedy selection.

Get Snapping with CorelDRAW’s Object-Snapping Features

By Steve Bain

If you’ve ever fumbled around trying to align your cursor to something, you can bid this frustrating task farewell. Object snapping was improved in version 12 to include new modes to give you maximum snapping control that works together with the program’s new Dynamic Guides feature.

You can instantly snap to text baselines, object nodes, edges, midpoints, centers and ellipse quadrants; or snap to ellipse tangents, perpendicular angles or angles specified as Dynamic Guide paths. For example, you can snap the baseline of a text object to a rectangle, like this:

 

Test-driving CorelDRAW’s PowerTRACE Features

By Steve Bain

In the publishing world, it happens all too often. Someone sends you a low-qualitly logo image at the last minute, when what you really need is a digital vector file — preferably in the proper colors. If you’ve run into this scenario before, you may already know how time-consuming the manual-conversion process can be. In this tutorial, I’ll build on my previous PowerTRACE installment by showing you how easily PowerTRACE can convert pixels to vector shapes.

We’ll tackle a bitmap-tracing project that will enable you to quickly produce an accurate two-color vector version of a logo design. Along the way, you’ll learn how to use many of the powerful new features engineered into PowerTRACE that make the process fast and efficient.

Customize CorelDRAW to Fit Your Workflow

By Steve Bain

If you like the convenience of having quick access to just the right tools or commands exactly when and where you want as you work, you’ll love the customization features built into the CorelDRAW® Graphics Suite.

Cool Tricks with Paragraph Text in CorelDRAW

By Steve Bain

These days, there’s no excuse for churning out plain-looking text layouts. Using recent versions of CorelDRAW, there are so many ways you can make text more interesting to read, it’s a shame not to take advantage of them. In this tutorial, we’ll explore a few tricks that you can use with paragraph text to produce more visually appealing and professional-looking text layouts. Although this tutorial depicts a previous CorelDRAW release version, these tips are valid throughout virtually all recent versions of the program.

Dynamic Guides May Change the Way You Draw

By Steve Bain

Once in a while, you discover a drawing feature that’s so innovative, it has the potential to completely change the way you draw. The dynamic guides in CorelDRAW will do just that. In fact, after using dynamic guides for a while, you’ll wonder how you ever did without them. In this tutorial, I’ll reveal just how great these convenient guides really are.

Create Your Own Font Designs Using CorelDRAW (Part II)

By Steve Bain

CorelDRAW provides powerful resources for creating custom logotype, symbol, or character designs. Discover how easily you can turn your design into a digital font you can use in any text-capable application in this continuation of my 2-part tutorial on creating custom fonts.

Managing Shadow Printing in Older CorelDRAW Releases

By Steve Bain

One of the niftiest effect tools in CorelDRAW’s toolbox has got to be the Interactive Drop Shadow Tool. It enables you to instantly apply soft, beautiful shadow effects. CorelDRAW’s drop shadow effects are bitmap-based. But if you’ve ever wondered about your shadow’s color model and resolution properties you’re not along. The answer is often critical to print workflows and largely depends on which version you are using.