While the design community has been recently celebrating the 20th anniversary of Adobe Photoshop, it's by no means the only graphics application with more than two decades of experience under its belt. The CorelDRAW vector illustration and page layout program is also a member of this elite group, with it being for many years the central element of Corel's Graphics Suite. Version X5 (their way of indicating 15) recently shipped with enhancements to asset management, color management and web graphics creation, beefed up learning resources, and more content than ever (which is saying a lot.)

Bundled content now includes 10,000 clipart images, 1,000 royalty-free photos, 1,000 fonts, 2,000 vehicle templates and 350 design templates. Given all that, users will probably welcome the new Corel CONNECT application, a full-screen browser that synchronizes with both CorelDRAW and CorelPHOTO-PAINT (the capable image editor included with the suite) to provide quick access to content on a computer, network or disc. Support for graphics file formats has also been increased, to more than 100. Also included are long-time Suite applications Corel PowerTRACE and Corel CAPTURE, the latter for creating screen grabs.

New and updated features include a B-Spline tool, scalable arrowheads, enhanced Connector and Dimension tools, and a new Segment Dimension tool. The Mesh Fill tool has also been improved to help users design multi-colored filled objects with more fluid color transitions. New web graphics tools let users work in bitmap mode directly within CorelDRAW by viewing detailed pixels, and provide the ability for work to be previewed before being published online.

New Document (CorelDRAW) and Image (Corel PHOTO-PAINT) dockers are said to allow users to save project-specific colors and to reuse colors from a previous project. Eyedroppers have also been added to several color dialog boxes, color palettes and color pickers, providing more convenient color sampling opportunities. Mastering the Suite has been made easier thanks to a new full color, hard-cover guidebook providing general tips, as well as specific techniques from professional designers working in fashion, jewelry design, book illustration, vehicle wrapping, product packaging and other design-related professions. The Suite also comes with more than two hours of video tutorials.

CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X5 for Windows can be purchased on the Corel site for $489. A trial version is also available for download. The design work below is by Jacob Mesick.