Page 55 - Xara Web Designer Premium

Getting Started 55

More than this, Web Designer Premium supports graduated transparency. It works very
like the graduated color fill. In the TRANSPARENCY TOOL just drag across your shape and
you can see the transparency fades. You can adjust the degree of transparency of each
end of the fill arrow, by clicking on either end of the arrow, and adjusting the
Transparency slider.
Preview this and you'll find this works in your browser as well.

Feather
This is a graphical term for blending the edges of objects. Web Designer Premium
provides a feather control that enables any object, graphics, text or photo to be feathered
- giving it a blurred edge that blends with the background. The Feather control is not a
tool on the left, but one of the controls on the top bar. Try it on your rectangle shape.
Select the shape and then click this Feather control on the right of the top bar.

The shadow below the ball drawing above has a feathered edge. Combining all of these
controls you can very quickly produce amazing layered graphics for your design, all
directly in Web Designer Premium without needing any other graphics tools.

This is an example of a rounded rectangle with
grad color, grad transparency and feathered
edges with some text placed on top of it.

This has a graduated color fill, light to dark green
going left to right. It also has a vertical graduated
transparency fading from top to bottom. The
feather gives it a soft edge. It takes a couple of
seconds to create such an image, and it's
automatically converted to the right graphic when
you save your design.

Shadow Tool
A very popular graphics effect is to create a soft drop- shadow under a graphic or some
text. This serves to lift the object away from the background.

The SHADOW TOOL lets you add a soft shadow to any object, text, graphics or
photo. Select the SHADOW TOOL and just drag on the object. You can adjust the
shadow blur and transparency using InfoBar controls.