Product Reviews

Never try to be all things to all people. That's an axiom that Stone Design's Create has profitably ignored for the better part of two decades. After all, this is a vector illustration application with ambitions in page layout and a hankering for a future in web design. And, perhaps surprisingly, Create makes a decent job of all three tasks - version 13 is a better alternative than ever to mainstream design applications.

Create can trace its history back to its first appearance on NextStep, the precursor to Mac OS X. Like other applications that share its heritage, Create is object-oriented. It treats every item on its page as a separate object whose attributes can be changed by dragging effects onto them from palettes. It's an approach that can take some getting used to, but feels very intuitive after a while. It also means a surprisingly flexible approach.

The most obvious example of this is Create's Image Well, represented by a small icon that sits on the right hand of every page. The Well is an on-the-fly translator for page objects, letting you export them instantly in one of a range of image types, including EPS and Tiff, or text formats such as RTF and plain text.

To use it, you select the object and choose its export format from a drop-down menu just below the Well. To export to the desktop, you drag the Well itself over it. Create cleverly interprets your intentions, so that if you select more than one graphic, and choose an image type from the Well, Create will export them as one image. If you don't have any elements selected and choose PDF as an export format, you can drag the whole page as a PDF. Text areas are dealt with similarly, making it easy to pull stories out of the document as RTF or Ascii files. As blends and effects are treated as objects, the Well can export these, too, or generate thumbnail images of an entire page.

The Image Well serves as a gatekeeper to another of Create's striking features, the Library Resources window. This stores objects, organised by type, in a tabbed palette. It may sound like the floating library palettes found in other applications, but this is in a different league. You can add a page object as a resource in any format by dragging it from the Well. You can also store patterns, effects and even entire Create pages. You can apply effects to page objects by dragging them from the Resources Library window onto an object on the page, and add the same effect to multiple items.

Most people would regard Create as an illustration program. Its vector and freehand tools aren't quite on a par with those of Illustrator, but Create will tempt illustrators through its support for transparency and drop shadows, which, as with most things in the program, are easily applied to objects through an Inspector palette. Like Illustrator, Create can convert both text and bitmap images to vectors, but the ability to freely mix vector and bitmap objects in the same document is the program's real plus point, alongside the way you can manage unlimited fills and strokes on a single object through the Inspector palette.

Create

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offers workmanlike, rather than spectacular, layout tools. We liked the way you can drag images and text files onto a document directly from the Finder or from open web pages, but we found navigation initially awkward and missed the equivalent of a QuarkXPress Measurements palette or InDesign Control palette. This makes it difficult to quickly establish the properties of a page element, and doing simple things such as changing a typeface requires a trip to the standard Mac OS X Font palette.

Create's take on master pages - master layers - is superb. The clunky appearance of the Master Layers palette mask, which lists layers on one side and pages on the other, belies its power. You can apply more than one master layer to a page at a time, so you can build separate masters for page numbers and other common page elements and combine them on one page. Create also makes it a single-click process to add master layers to all pages in a document, or just the odd- or even-numbered pages.

The program's object-oriented approach again shines through when styling text. Apply styles to a text area by dragging a style from the Text Styles window over it. To use the selected text as the basis for a new style, choose the Style option in the Image Well and drag that to the Text Styles window.

For all its great features, Create's handiest trick is its ability to turn any document into a web page through a single menu command or keyboard shortcut.

Heavy use is made of tables to replicate the layout of Create pages. In most cases it does a great job, although as experienced HTML authors might expect, overlapping page elements aren't smoothly translated, which can be jarring if you have overlapping graphics on master layers. At least Create warns you and lets you correct matters before you commit to the translation. Additional HTML elements such as keywords, body text and scripts can be added to the Web Options window and embedded in the exported HTML document.

Version 13 significantly beefs up its web export options with support for advanced XHTML and CSS. CSS support is very impressive. Create generates individual font and body CSS files when you export a document to HTML, and it includes custom classes for named text areas and separate classes for each text style used. The properties of the font class default to the typeface specified in the Create document's own style sheet, so viewers with the same font installed on their Mac or PC should see a fairly accurate reproduction of the text.

It's worth noting that, like iWeb, Create is an HTML creator rather than an editor, so you can't easily re-import generated HTML back into Create. That rules it out if you regularly want to tweak your HTML, but if you just need to create a basic site from Create-compatible artwork, there isn't an easier way of doing it.

Create does have odd moments - palettes sometimes don't stay above the document, so it's easy to lose them - but the best part about the program is the growing appreciation of features that aren't instantly obvious, such as AppleScript support so complete that you can rebuild a document from scratch by saving it as an AppleScript in Create and then running the script in Script Editor. Or the way you can combine two documents just by dragging the file icon of one from the Finder over the open document window of another.

How's this for an unusual feature among design programs? Create's free-upgrade-for-life policy makes its reasonable price even better value. While we wouldn't recommend dumping your favourite design app for this program, if you spend any time in Create's company, it's difficult not to fall for its charms.