Website Design

Sticky Objects

These are objects that you can 'stick' in place as the page scrolls underneath. A good example is the NavBar which you can stick to the top of the page as viewers scroll down, so they can still easily navigate to other pages without having to scroll back up to the top. In v11 any object can be stuck to any position on the page, or the left of right edge of the browser window.

Example site (with NavBar and logo stuck to the top, social buttons stuck to the left and a footer stuck to the bottom. Based on the new Hipster theme.)

You can now 'stick' objects such as social networking buttons, NavBars or footers, so they remain in view as the page is scrolled up and down

Stretchy Backgrounds

Website designs with no obvious page boundary are now very popular, and in this sort of design you'll commonly see a page background that covers the entire browser window and stretches to fill the browser width. In Designer Pro X11 you can make any rectangle or image stretch to fill the browser window, either horizontally or vertically.

Example site (the top photo stretches across the whole width. Based on the new John James theme.)

Add a 'stretching' background image across the full width of the page

'Website M' hosting included free

Designer Pro X11 includes ‘Website M’ hosting, free for one year (worth \$1.99 a month). This includes 2GBytes of free web hosting space and one free domain name (e.g. yourname.com or .co.uk or .de etc). Plus if you publish with our Website M hosting you can password protect your web pages.

New Animation Possibilities

A new Web Animation dialog introduces powerful and easy to use new animation capabilities. You can now set up objects to:

Animate on mouseover
Animate on reveal ie when the object first comes into view or a trigger object comes into view. So for example you can set objects to slide or fade into view as you scroll down a page
Animate on click (or tap on a touch device)

What's more there are some eye catching new animation types for mouseover and click such as wobble and bounce.

Example site (on reveal - buttons on photo heading slide in from right and left, circular photos fade in, and Headlines slide in from right and left. Based on the new Ultimate theme).

Some of the new animation styles that can now be triggered by click (or tap), mouseover or 'on reveal'

Secure FTP Publishing Options

Designer Pro X11 now offers support for publishing with SFTP and FTPS.

Other Minor Web Improvements

Ability to control the inter-page gap in vertical and horizontal supersites
Web export options dialog now usable offline
Small improvements in the drop-down menus
Accurate export of text with manual kerns
Option to export retina version of web graphic at the same time as 96dpi version
Some improvements to photo gallery widgets (you can now set the size of the pop-up)

Online Editing in the Cloud

Document Sync With Dropbox or GDrive

Designer Pro X11 can now sync files via Dropbox and Google Drive. So if you have the same file open on multiple computers, and you make an edit and save the file on one computer, it will be updated in Designer Pro X11 on the other computers.

And there's another bonus: Dropbox and Google Drive maintain older versions of your files, and provide easy ways of viewing and reverting back to earlier versions (in Dropbox simply right click on a file and select 'View previous versions'). This is a safe, easy and storage-saving way of maintaining multiple versions of your files.

Easily sync your documents via Dropbox or Google Drive

Illustration & Graphic Design

Art Brushes

There's a big step forward for the Brush Tool with significant improvements to the existing Scatter Brushes and a totally new type of Art Brush.

Scatter Brushes repeat shapes along a line and you can now create them using any type of object (so for example you could include feathering or extrusions). Art Brushes stretch a vector shape or bitmap along the line.

v11 includes a large collection of ready made Art Brushes, but you can easily create your own

Xara owners Frances Proctor and Penny O'Rorke have been quick off the mark in making creative use of the new Art Brushes. We're looking forward to seeing your examples in the Art Gallery forum of TalkGraphics.com

New Blend Modes / Transparency Types

5 new W3C standard, web-safe and PDF-safe blend modes in the Transparency Tool (Overlay, Hard Light, Soft Light, Luminosity & Color - see the Release Notes for more information).

nb Bleach and Stained Glass have been renamed (Multiply and Screen) to match industry standards.

The new blend modes offer plenty of opportunity to experiment

Liquify Shape Editing Tools

Fans of the Shape Painter Tool will love the extra flexibility offered by a new selection of vector shape editing tools (in the drop down list in the Shape Painter InfoBar).

Example using the Warp Liquify Tool

Text Handling

Hyphenation

A new hyphenation option automatically breaks long words at line ends to give a more flowing appearance to your text and fit more words into limited space. The hyphenation dialog offers full control.

Comprehensive hyphenation controls

Auto-Correct / Abbreviation Expansion

Create your own list of abbreviations that will be automatically expanded as you type, so for example XDP could be expanded to Xara Designer Pro as you type. It's great for symbols too - for example you might set up yen to render ¥.

Create your own list of abbreviations that will be automatically expanded as you type

Other Text Enhancements

A text background color option so you can easily highlight words
An easy way to replace one font with another throughout a document (especially useful for replacing missing fonts in imported PDFs)
'Update style to match' option (useful for copying styles from another document or applying styles to unstyled documents, particularly imported PDFs)
More detailed information on font permissions in Document Information
Update of the Font Awesome Symbols (a quick & easy way to insert symbols from the large and growing Font Awesome selection. The full set is displayed via the Insert menu)
Google fonts updated
Fonts will look correct in exported documents where fonts are missing if outlines are embedded (for example from imported PDFs, most of which include embedded character outlines)
Option to show extended Text Tool InfoBar, instead of some controls being in a flyout bar
A handy Insert > Rule off option in the Insert menu.

Embedded Graphics

Two changes give you much greater control over any graphics that you embed into your text.

Firstly when you insert a graphic into a text column it is now automatically resized down to column width.

Secondly you can control whether it's embedded inline in your text or whether text should flow to the left or right of your embedded graphic.

Choose whether a graphic is embedded inline, or whether text should flow to the left or right

Content

New Slideshow Widget

A powerful and flexible new Widget for creating slideshows. You can see another example in this demo site (the photos of the different bikes in the New Models section). You'll find the Widget in the Designs Gallery under Page Elements & Widgets > Photo Slideshows & Galleries, nb free registration is required).

An example slideshow created with the new widget in v11

New Web Themes

37 new General Website Themes (normally sold in Web Packs for \$10 each!) with up to 16 page layouts, all including new mobile variants.

View previews of a selection of the themes (including all new ones, marked NEW).

37 new web themes, all with mobile variants

Other

Import & Export Enhancements

PDF Import:

Improved text editability (improved text reconstruction, margins, better text link import, better underline import)
Better support for import of PDFs with embedded font subsets, where fonts are not installed locally
Many other minor fixes and improvements.

Other Import / Export

Improvements to Word import.

Bonus Software

The great Photolooks 2 plug-in was bundled with v10 and will be included again with v11. Photolooks is a powerful and flexible plug-in (previously sold by Red Giant for \$199!) that could change the way you approach color in photography! It includes over 100 presets, but you can dive deeper by exploring the PhotoLooks tools and their powerful way of manipulating color and light to create your own custom effects.

Create an infinite variety of subtle (or not so subtle!) effects using PhotoLooks2

Other Misc Enhancements

A new option Arrange > Combine Shapes > Intersect all shapes (the overlapping areas of shapes become separate shapes)
Improved support in the drawing tools for modern touch devices, including the Microsoft Surface stylus
Two new SmartShapes, a photo text panel and a spiral (you can find SmartShapes in the Designs Gallery / Content Catalog or Insert > Shape) doubleclick to show the edit handles
InfoBar pulses on tool selection
RAW filter updated with the latest camera models
Auto-creation of links when you type a URL so for example typing xara.com will automatically create a link to the Xara site (useful for PDFs as well as web pages).

Have fun with the new Spiral SmartShape

Panorama Tool Improvements

Fans of the integrated photo panorama tool will be happy to see some big improvements, see the Release Notes for full details.

Panorama examples.

It's easy to stitch together photos to create an impressive panorama