Visit the Xara graphics forums to discuss or find answers to your graphics needs.

• We love RKissane’s broken egg illustration in the Xara Art Gallery forum. What’s more he has included a link to a tutorial that shows exactly how he created it: why not download it now and see if you can break your eggs as well as Ray. Great tutorial.
  
  
• We are really enjoying the scribble challenge this month. We were very impressed with Egg Bramhill's baboon and Penny O'Rorke's aliens made us smile too. As usual Rik never ceases to amaze us with his designs. It's not too late to join in the October Scribble Challenge. Keep creating, keep sharing!
  
  
• Thank you Rik for taking us back to our childhood cartoon memories. We remember Wacky Races, Atom Ant and Secret Squirrel. Those were the days!
  
  
• If you enjoyed the word challenge last month then check out the October variation. Wizard509 has provided a set of shapes, all you have to do is use them to illustrate the word Bat, so give your powers of invention a work out and join the October challenge!

You're in for a treat, because we have 3 new movies this month.

The new photo handles (in v365) are a really easy way to resize, rotate and crop your photos. Find out how in this Photo Handles tutorial.

Our second movie looks at the new and enhanced Online Content Catalog.

And in our final movie you can find out how to create subtle and not so subtle photo effects with the Photo Effect Painter tool, new in Photo and Graphic Designer and Xara Designer Pro X365.

Why not subscribe to our YouTube channel while you're there and you'll hear about new movies as we add them.

Photo & Graphic Designer 365 Updated
Find out what's new in this first update since launch, accessible to all 365 owners under our new Update Service. What's New

Get a Discount Voucher for the New Versions of MAGIX Software
Buy any Xara Designer title or Xara 3D Maker during October and you'll get a discount voucher for any of the MAGIX audio & video titles sold in the Xara online store. What's more they've all been updated to new versions this month!
Discover the new MAGIX titles

New Owner Surveys
We've just posted a new survey for owners of the 365 versions of Photo & Graphic Designer / Designer Pro X, and the Web Designer Premium survey is still running. It only takes a few minutes and your feedback is really appreciated. As a little extra incentive we'll pick one lucky respondent at random to win a free upgrade the next version.
Give us your feedback

Xara News, As It Happens
You can be first to receive Xara news by signing up to the RSS feed on our News page, or you can join more than 54, 259 followers in our Facebook community or if you prefer our Google + page, or follow our tweets at twitter.com/xaragroup.

The Advanced Tool Bar
You can now turn on and off an additional toolbar using the button toggle button on the end of the Text InfoBar. When you are in the Text Tool the bar appears below the InfoBar by default, but as with all bars in Designer, you can drag the bar to another location. For example if you have a very wide screen you may wish to move it to the right side of the InfoBar.

In Photo & Graphic Designer 365 the bar shows baseline shift, tracking and kerning and aspect ratio. In Designer Pro X365 it additionally shows auto-hyphenation and the new paragraph options ('keep with next paragraph' and 'keep lines together).

Graphics.com are impressed with our latest release of Xara Photo & Graphic Designer:

“What does it all add up to? In our view, it’s by far the best value for Windows users seeking a solid mix of document-driven illustration and photo-editing capabilities, wrapped up in a single application.” Read the whole review.