Design And Print It Yourself

April 12, 2004

Whether it’s greeting cards, signs, newsletters, certificates, calendars, labels or a host of other projects, you can print or e-mail your own colorful, fun and/or professional-looking designs by using a print program. The updated versions of these programs make print projects easier than ever. Let’s look:

The Print Shop Deluxe 20 (Broderbund, Windows 98/2000/Me/XP with Pentium II, Deluxe CD-ROM or DVD version $49.99), is the latest version of one of the oldest and most popular printing programs around, celebrating its 20^th anniversary and boasting more than 18 million copies sold. The program features a vast array of personal print projects, such as greeting cards, invitations and more as well as business printing, such as stationery, business cards and brochures. This well-designed program is even easier to use than previous versions and includes more than 16,000 professionally designed templates and more than 310,000 images. The images were gathered especially for Print Shop from collections such as Christie’s Papyrus and others and make great additions to your print projects.

The pre-designed templates included with the program are for many commonly-used projects such as newsletters or calendars and even some not-so-common ones, such as absence report forms, so there’s something for just about everybody. Greeting cards are a snap to do by selecting from ready-made cards, customizing them as needed or using the Creative-Touch 3D and cut-out cards and photo greetings. Even animated greeting cards, complete with music and your personal messages, are available for e-mail.

The QuickPick feature helps you choose the project appropriate for your needs, and the QuickStart feature steps you through the creation of each project--whether you’re using the template or doing it from scratch. Photo-theme projects make full use of your photos to personalize printed materials. This version of The Print Shop includes Web page designing, making it easy to set up good-looking web pages and/or complete Web sites that include photos, sound and videos. Also included is an improved photo editing module for cropping, resizing, changing brightness, contrast or color balance, removing red-eye and adding special effects such as frames, chalk or brush, solarize and many more.

New color correction features can optimize your color printing, and using the ProPrint technology will vastly improve the appearance of your printed projects by removing the "jaggies" and more. A Hot Shots Viewer feature lets you access all your photos, images, headlines and more right from the design desk and add them to your projects with drag-and-drop ease. You can also create slide shows or screen savers and burn CDs from the Viewer. These slide show CDs can be viewed on a TV using a DVD player.

All projects can be printed on your own printer, but a new feature also lets you save projects as a PDF file so they can be printed professionally at your local print shop or online at Broderbund.com. You can also send your PDF file on disk or via the Internet to share with others, who will be able to view them using the free Adobe Acrobat Reader. This is a great way to electronically distribute brochures, various kinds of forms and much more. The included Address Book and Mail Manager make mailings easy to send by keeping contact info right in the program.

If you build your own projects from scratch, expect a learning curve for this full-featured program for any but the simplest tasks. No printed user manual is available, but a set of tutorials cover many of the common features to get you started, and there‘s the project wizards and online help as well. Once you get the hang of this program, you’ll be amazed at your results.

PrintMaster Platinum 16 (Broderbund, Windows 98/Me/2000/XP with Pentium; $39.99) is a good value that we found 1-2-3-4 easy: select a project, choose a style, customize text or graphics, and print. Some of the features noted for Print Shop are also available in this newest version of PrintMaster Platinum 16, including project wizards with more than 17,000 projects and more than 280,000 images, including the exclusive Paramount Greeting Cards and Patriotic art collections. A cool feature is the party set projects, in which you can create a theme-coordinated set of invitations and decorations for a party, including banners, hats, boxes and more.

The photo editor is especial easy to use, with a split screen showing before and after changes made to your photos. The included Hot Shots Viewer helps you organize your photos and create slide shows. No export to PDF file is available in this program. No printed user manual is provided, so you’ll have to rely on the on-line help feature for anything but the most straightforward tasks.

These programs make it easy and fun to create designs to print or e-mail to friends, family or to business clients or associates. It’s never been easier to personalize and to create print materials for just about any purpose. Either of these programs is a must for the home or business computer user. Our personal favorite is Print Shop.

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