Xara 3D Maker 7

Using Xara 3D Maker is like having a clever ball of electronic modelling clay that you can use to create letters, buttons, badges and titles and then bend them into hundreds of different shapes before decorating them with all manner of colours, textures, shadows and light sources.

Encouragingly for beginners, almost all of this can be accomplished by manipulating the text you are working on directly with the mouse pointer by pulling it this way and that – and even on our not-very-fast test PC, this was quick and pretty intuitive.

This new version includes some small but useful tidy-ups and features such as full Windows 7 compatibility, automatic saving when the program's closed, new types of bevel and new scrolling animations.

Besides all the manual editing tools, 3D Maker includes stacks of presets to get the user started creating 3D text. They offer a leg-up for some of the trickier operations such as adding bevels – rather than starting with nothing you can load a preset and edit the contents.

As well as static text, 3D Maker can create animated 3D titles that can be used as Windows screen savers or animated GIF images for a website. It can also export animations in the format required by Magix's home movie and photo slideshow programs (Xara is a subsidiary of Magix) and even create simple Flash animations - though there are limitations to what you can achieve and file sizes can get large rather quickly.

Although it's generally easy to use, 3D Maker has one irksome design ‘feature': it doesn't allow you to create anything from scratch – instead you have to load either the default movie title animation, the last project you were working on or one of the included projects. It's not possible to be faced with a blank page.

While we were impressed with the quality of the results, everything we created looked as though it belonged on a website from 1995. The kind of graphics it produces are quite old fashioned, but if you have a use for them this program does the job well.