iDraw showing texture map

A while back I reviewed Artboard — an inexpensive Illustrator-replacement-wannabe — fairly positively. I then discovered a bunch of limitations and bugs, and tried iDraw. (Note this is a review of the Mac version of iDraw. I haven’t tried the iPad version yet.)

Having used iDraw quite extensively for the last few months I can only say that, for my uses, iDraw pretty much kicks not only Artboard’s butt, it kicks Illustrator’s as well (until you get to Photoshop integration). The only application that holds a candle to it is Sketch (another excellent program I need to review).

The most challenging thing I’ve been doing with iDraw is texturing a 3d character. Normally I would do something like this in Photoshop or some other dedicated bitmap graphics program, but I wanted a simple, clean look, and ended up trying a wide variety of programs including Photoshop, Acorn, Pixelmator, Mischief, and Artboard — before settling on iDraw. For the kinds of things I was trying to do, iDraw was simply head-and-shoulders above the rest. Color me very impressed.

Now if only iDraw could include Sketch’s ability to set named export areas with specific objects included or excluded from export it would be awesome. But as it is, Sketch and Artboard can talk to each other via SVG so it’s no big deal.

(If you’re looking for a replacement for Fireworks, Sketch isn’t exactly that — but as a tool for creating pixel-perfect vector art, it’s probably better.)

Solid Drawing Tools

Screen Shot 2013-10-03 at 10.18.32 PM

iDraw’s drawing tools are solid and well-implemented (better than most — note the compound path support), with good snapping (both to grids and other objects). Indeed, unlike Sketch (which I also like a great deal) iDraw’s snapping works correctly when dragging multiple objects (no need to great groups just to make snapping work).

Powerful Styling

iDraw's style interface

Like any useful bezier drawing application, iDraw supports booleans. Unlike most of its rivals, iDraw provides an incredibly powerful and flexible set of tools for styling shapes. Again, Sketch comes close to iDraw in this regard, but iDraw lets you explicitly reorder the different effects whereas Sketch (as far as I can tell) does not.

Artboard's mystifying style palette
Artboard’s mystifying style palette

iDraw’s styling UI is not only better than Artboard’s (or Illustrator’s or Sketch’s for that matter), it has most of the precision controls you need — e.g. you can control whether a stroke runs inside, outside, or centered on a path — although you don’t have Sketch’s or Illustrator’s fine control over corners and caps. In comparison, Artboard’s styling controls are crude and in many cases simply mystifying.

 

Screen Shot 2013-10-03 at 8.43.19 AM

 

Here’s some detail from the texture map I was working on. Note there’s all kinds of subtle layered effects on the different components of the pupil.

Sketch pupil detail imported

 

Here’s the same pupil exported from iDraw as SVG and then imported into Sketch. (No, it didn’t get turned into a bitmap en route!)

Artboard imported pupil detail

 

And here’s the same pupil imported into Artboard. Also note the horribly rendered bezier handles on the selected object. Not a functional problem (they work just fine) but ugly.

Workflow

Clearly, iDraw can export SVGs that other programs can read, which is a great start. (Artboard can export to PDF but not, as far as I can tell, SVG, which is a huge black mark.)

iDraw's export dialogiDraw can in fact export to pretty much any file format you’d want (no EPS! — how times have changed) but it doesn’t have the export workflow niceties of Sketch (which lets you create named export regions and if necessary specify exactly which objects get rendered within each region, and then allows every region to be exported with one click).

Shortcomings

Probably the single biggest failing of iDraw is its weak typography. If you’re looking for  any typographic tools beyond pair kerning, look elsewhere. It is possible to get good type out of iDraw but it has a weird bug in the default style of text where text by default seems to have text, fill, and stroke styles (and looks awful). If you turn off everything except the fill style it looks fine. But there’s no real ability to deal with body type conveniently (or tables), so if you need to do anything more than a logo, you probably need a different program.

Unlike Artboard, iDraw allows you to use CMYK colors. If you’re working in print, you’ll still probably want Illustrator, but unlike Artboard or Sketch, it’s at least usable.

Aside from these two items, I’d like to see some more control over strokes (corners and caps), and there are a few fit and finish problems (e.g. the way styles are rendered in the style palette is a bit wonky, especially for text styles).

Conclusion

Overall, iDraw is my favorite vector drawing program right now, although for drawing UI components I’d give the edge to Sketch, which deserves its own review. There are some other programs I haven’t mentioned, such as Lineform, ZeusDraw, and Intaglio. These are all not bad — probably better than Artboard — but I prefer iDraw to all of them, and at $24.95 (in the App Store) I believe it’s cheaper than any of them.