Ever since man, or indeed woman, could pick up a bit of charcoal and sketch stick animals on the inside of their cave, drawing has been a fond pursuit for those lucky enough to have artistic talent. The rest of us, well, we can admire works of art, or perhaps get a computer to do the hard work for us with a program like Draw 4.5.

Draw is a vector based drawing program that comes complete with a library of templates. These consist of business cards, certificates, postcards, T-shirts, compliment slips, CD and cassette covers. It's a rather small and unimpressive collection to be quite honest, and the inclusion of tape and video cassette covers shows that this program might have been used by cave dwellers themselves. Okay, perhaps a touch harsh but still... you should see the pastel pink and yellow design for the video sleeves; it couldn't be more eighties if it was wearing a pair of legwarmers.

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More interestingly, the program sports three so-called pilot templates, which are basically wizards that can be used to create a greetings card, certificate and logo respectively. For instance, if you wish to design a card the program offers a choice of nine types (birthday, Christmas, etc.) and nine set layouts. Then it lets you customise the message and select a picture from its decent range of a few hundred cartoon-style pieces of clipart. This is ideal for giving a beginner some easily understood customisation options.

Naturally, you don't need to use any templates or wizards, and can create your own effort from scratch using the tools provided. The drawing tools are a fairly standard repertoire of freehand, custom curves and shapes (from circles to polygons and stars). A toolbar on the right-hand side of the workspace allows quick access to simple transformations (rotation, reflection), along with one-click buttons to automatically align objects. The basics of Draw 4.5 are certainly easy to get a handle on.

Some fancier functions are also present, such as the facility to make 2D shapes into 3D with one click (plus you can adjust the 3D boundary box, playing around with perspectives until you decide which you prefer). Various warping effects are on hand, ready to turn those standard bits of clipart into funhouse mirror images, and there are some pretty funky fonts, too (Blade Runner and Terminator text, anyone?)

Finally, a couple of bonus programs are thrown in with the package; a basic screen capture utility and a picture browser, the latter being used within Draw when you want to go hunting through the clipart folders.

A basic but user friendly design package with some interesting features thrown in. However, the templates provided aren't particularly impressive and the program does have a slightly dated feel.