There’s no longer any excuse to send off those lame photocopied holiday greeting letters with the pathetic little sprig of holly sketch in the corner. A new product from American Greetings makes customized Christmas cards so simple even the most harried household could manage to look at least modestly creative.
In short, if you like mainstream greeting card art and you’ve got a good quality color printer, you’ll never have to buy a card again with this simple software program in your home. Greeting cards galore are just the start.
Timed for the holidays, American Greetings offers an easy-to-use CD-ROM program that’s packed with creative projects now known in the trade as “social expression products.” This program offers thousands of variations on 28 projects from albums to T-shirt designs with everything from newsletters to business cards, photo projects to brochures in between. You can simply print out ready-made materials or design your own from scratch.
Greeting cards — of every custom shape and size — are a big part of this program’s attraction. American Greetings Print! (Windows, $49) contains thousands of card designs and sentiments that can be selected and printed in less than five minutes. You can quickly narrow the field of possible selections by tailoring searches for specific occasions, as well as the appropriate tone, such as humorous, traditional, sentimental, contemporary or spiritual.
The program also provides templates and designs for 27 other project types, such as banners and newsletters, party bags and puzzles. For those with scanners and/or digital cameras, the program also offers the ability to incorporate and modify family photos in projects and designs. Users also have the option of creating their own designs from scratch or modifying existing designs by changing type styles, wording and modifying or adding art elements.
A detailed electronic address book and labeling system, with automatic sorting and addressing systems, streamlines mailing. A customized calendar and helpful Forget Me Not feature automatically sends preprogrammed reminders about important dates and events every time the program starts up. Internet access provides immediate on-line help, as well as access to many more American Greetings graphic designs and features that can be purchased and added to the program.
The makers have gone out of their way to make this a user-friendly, intuitive program. Those who are unfamiliar with graphic design tools and “work spaces” will have to play around a bit before feeling comfortable with the formatting tools and process. In addition, it may take some practice to figure out the most efficient way to layer tasks on the screen.
The package includes a clearly written user’s guide with detailed tutorials.
Before committing to the program, it makes sense to take a close look at American Greeting cards and products at a card shop. That will give you a pretty good feel for the kinds of art and designs the company offers. While there’s plenty of variety, the overall approach is definitely straitlaced mainstream.
Buyers should also compare this program to others. The extras might be too much for what many users need or the capacity of their computer systems. A standard version of this same program sells for $29.
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