I made my first picture on a BBC micro at 9, following through software such Canvas on the Atari ST and a dos-based true-colour app called NeopPaint on the PC, and eventually on to Xara Studio in the late mid-late 90s. I had looked at vector packages before, but what was available at that point had never really done anything for me. They were all severely processor intensive and I couldn't come to grips sole use of the bezier tool for creating shapes. Xara on the other hand flew, it was intuitive, and everything was done in real-time with antialiasing, transparencies, booleans...

Back before I discovered photoshop I liked to use Xara for photo-manipulation, made possible by the treatment of bitmaps as standard boolean vector shapes - I still do miss some of Xara's functionality for doing this kind of thing, I'll be very happy when you can finally do a transparency gradient in photoshop.

As well as this as you can see from the examples I also do some more traditional work with Xara, purely vector-based illustration and graphic design, including in particular designing vector objects to be imported into Flash.

—Ian Hamilton