Any of the designers in here use XaraX ?
If not, I strongly recommend it .
A little info about XaraX

It is a drawing and illustration tool 50 times faster than illustrator and with an interface made for the designer, very simple to use and very powerful .
With it you can create original artwork for websites, print materials and even create gif animations. It has a support for the most important File Formats (ai ,eps , png, jpg, gif) and can even export directly in flash format ( swf ).

Here you can find XaraX.

Have fun with it !

I have used some of Xara's stuff in the past but to be honest it always exports the image in a crappier quality then it was before the export.

I hope this program is better.

Hi vectoreyes, I use Xara X1. It's a fast and great program. If you try to create 50 different gradient or transparency effects on Illustrator CS2 and Xara, there really is no comparison. Illustrator is an expensive bitmap tracer (ok, so there are other good things ).

Xara is fully WYSIWYG and exports with great image quality and high fidelity. A lot of beginning users like zman forget to match the DPI resolution on the export dialog to match their actual desktop screen resolution, resulting in crappy exports. Admittedly, Illustrator and Freehand do this automatically...

A lot of beginning users like zman forget to match the DPI resolution on the export dialog to match their actual desktop screen resolution, resulting in crappy exports.

A beginner is quite generous. I'm much worse than that.