The Content Catalog was introduced in v10 and is now a feature of all Designer products. It is an online extension of the Designs Gallery offering greatly improved browsing of content, within a resizeable window.
If you prefer to work off-line then you can download from the Online Content Catalog into the Local Designs Gallery and continue using the Designs Gallery.
Accessing the Content Catalog
The Content Catalog can be accessed from the program File menu, File > New from Content Catalog or from the program Insert menu, Insert > from Content Catalog.
Keyword Searching
All content is now searchable, making it much easier to find templates and components to add to your document or website. Select a category folder on the left and then enter a keyword in the search field to search in that category only. Or select ‘All’ on the left to search all available content.
Local Designs Gallery
The Designs Gallery has now become the Local Designs Gallery. As the name implies, this now shows only content that you have present locally on your device, because it was downloaded from the Content Catalogue. This makes it easier to find and access designs you use regularly.
The folder structure in the gallery still mirrors that of the Content Catalogue and each folder in the gallery has a link allowing you to jump straight into the corresponding folder in the Content Catalogue, so you can easily view what other content is available for download into that folder. Whenever you open or import a design file from the Catalogue, that file then appears in the Local Designs Gallery and so you can use it even when offline.
Stock Photos
This is unlike most stock photo libraries you may be used to, where you purchase a ‘royalty free’ image, with restricted license terms, often with limited production runs, limited reproduction rights, no re-distribution rights
An increasing number of photographers are submitting their work to the public domain, in particular under a license called CC0, which is a very liberal license, totally royalty free, where you can use the image for personal or commercial use with almost no limitation. Read more about the CC0 license.
In conjunction with Pixabay, a website that collected and collated a huge number of high quality CC0 images, we have included a section in the Content Catalog where you can search and download hi-res photos directly into Designer. Their collection includes high-quality images from sites such as Unsplash.com and other collections of CC0 licensed content
Stock Illustrations
In addition to stock photos, there’s now an additional category of vector graphic ‘stock illustrations’. All the images have keywords so you can easily search for the graphic you want. Select the Stock Illustrations category on the left side and enter a search term, such as ocean - see below.
Because the original vector files vary enormously in size, graphics larger than around 300px are scaled down. Also un-grouped images, are placed in a group for ease of manipulation. Because this is vector clipart, it’s re-sizable to any size without loss of quality.
Keep Content Catalog open after selection
Normally when you click on the Import button over the item you’ve chosen in the Content Catalog, the item is imported and the Catalog window closes. Now if you hold the Shift key down when clicking Import, the item is imported and the Catalog is kept open. This is useful if you want to try out several different items without having to keep re-opening the Catalog.
Download high resolution photos
Before this update photo resolution was limited to HD (1920x1080), but now when you import a stock photo into a print document you get the photo’s full resolution into your design. The resolution of photos varies, but most are much higher than HD resolution. When you import into a web document, as when importing local photos, the resolution is still limited to HD because it’s rare to need any higher resolution than this for a website.
Changes to the Content Catalogue since version 16.1
We've updated the web categories slightly and introduced a couple more folders where we've added more content. This is to make it easier to find the new website templates we're producing. The changes are as so:
- Websites
- Website Themes
- Single Page Websites
- Business Themes
Will change to:
- Websites
- Single Page Websites
- Modern Business Themes
- Classic Websites
"Arrows" will be renamed to "Lines and Arrows", and a new folder called "Photo Frames" will be introduced.
Due to technical reasons this does mean the Xara "loses" what has been downloaded... or rather it still exists in your appdata cache but Xara can't see it (so your local designs gallery appears blank) because of the restructuring. This means you can either re-import his into Xara or delete it and re-download. To import it into Xara:
- Open the Local Designs Gallery
- Click Disc Designs at the top
- At the bottom, type %appdata% and press enter
- Go up a folder and go to Local / Xara / (XtremePro|Xtreme|WebDesigner|WebDesignerPremium)* / (version number) / Cache / Designs / ENG /
- Click Add
*Xtreme = Photo and Graphic Designer, XtremePro = Designer Pro
Alternatively you can either delete these designs or do nothing, and they will be removed if you uninstall and reinstall. At worst, it will just take up a little bit of room on your hard disk (depending on how much you have downloaded).
The Content Catalogue and Local Designs Gallery will remain unaffected for versions before 16.1. If you are unsure of your version, please go to Help > About.
Robert Turner
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