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Friday, March 27, 2020

No Illustrator? Try YouIDraw! (free)

Here's a 15 minute review/demo of a browser-based vector graphics editor/creator. The free version is limited, but when it comes to something similar to Adobe Illustrator that can be done on a Chromebook, this is about as close as I have found.

Tools you will see:

  • Typical Move, Rotate, Skew
  • Shape tools
  • Type tool
  • Hand tool

Panels/Features you will see:

  • Layers panel
  • Pathfinder (similar) panel at top of the screen
  • Library (gradients are here, and it actually has objects and lots of shapes)
  • Properties panel (where you can change fonts, modify fill/stroke, transparency and appearance panel type things, flip horizontal/vertical, and the canvas size/background color)
  • Export button-- be sure to tell it to export OBJECTS and not entire Canvas if you want transparency
They have a pretty simple user guide, too-- https://site.youidraw.com/youidraw-drawing-user-guide.html

What's really missing-- (among other things)
  • No knife tool
  • No trace bitmap (you can insert images, though, and if they are SVG images, you can edit the paths, change colors, etc.)
  • No good control over angles
  • No Shapebuilder or other fancy tools
  • Text path tools
  • Ability (in free version) to export in anything other than PNG (transparent) and JPG

What it does that Illustrator DOES NOT do-- save to Google Drive!