Print Artist Grand Suite

Age Group: Age 8 and Up, Adults Type: Art/Creativity Price: $60

Requires: Pentium 100 MHz+, Win 95/98/NT, 16 MB RAM; 315 MB HD, 4XCD-ROM

Description:

Use Print Artist to design projects like greeting cards, web pages, banners, newsletters, calendars, signs and scrapbooks. Start with the Tutorial to get oriented. Then pick a project such as a brochure from a category in the pre-designed projects, open it up and get going. Pick colors, insert appropriate text and images, and apply special effects. Tweak it till you are satisfied with the look and then print or e-mail it.

Pre-designed projects include: Calendars, Cards (12 categories with similar choices to those found in a card store); Crafts like Bookmarks, Door Hangers, Gift Tags, Mobiles, Magnets and Scrapbooks; Posters (Banners, Certificates, Signs); Publications such as booklets and newsletters; Specialty items like business cards and recipe cards; and Stationery Sets. You can also start a blank project with varying page sizes and orientation.

My son's birthday is coming up soon, so I started with a birthday card. This was fun. I found a pre-designed soccer theme with an appropriate front page, then picked an illustration for the inside, modified the words and played around with the special effects on text - there is a tremendous selection from different blocking and shadowing to zooms and spirals, with additional effects on with colors. Buttons on the left of the screen provide tools for addition of text, insertion of quotes (greeting card types to philosophy and proverbs), and graphics grabbing from the graphics CD's or external files.

Pick a category in the Graphics Grabber. Check the Collections Manager settings to assign the graphics CD's to be searched. I selected all of them and then found there were 408 images of Books. The Graphics Grabber shows thumbnail images of all the graphics available in a category and CD's only have to be switched if you want to insert a specific graphic in the current project. You can also import your own images, such as family photos, into a project, and can have them added to the Graphics Grabber catalog.

Graphics handling is sophisticated with the ability to overlap and group images, and to layer graphics. You can also insert quotes into projects, from a large selection of 'card sentiments'. I found some of the Reflections, Proverbs and snippets of Philosophy interesting to browse. An address book can be maintained and its contents used in projects, for example for mailing labels, or to email creations to friends and family. Projects can be exported as html files and used in web pages.

In addition to Print Artist, this package comes with: Ecard Express, which has a small selection of animated ecards; Snapshot Express with the capability to enhance and catalog photos and use them in scrapbooks, cards and screensavers; iCollect which manages downloading and organizing pages from the Internet and lets you set up your own computer as a file server to share information with others; and Web Studio Express which provides web page design tools.

Features:

• 10 CD's
• 200,000 images & photos
• Import graphics
• Export projects as html files
• 11,000 layouts
• Over 300 AGFA fonts
• 5,000 card sentiments
• 138 page User Manual
• Animated e-cards
• Web image collecting
• Web design
• Artist Favorites Images
• Hallmark CardStudio Sampler
• Photo editing

Technical Aspects:

In addition to Print Artist, you can install Ecard Express, Snapshot Express, iCollect and Web Studio Express from the CD's. There was an error in reading the CD-ROM and I was unable to install Snapshot Express, but was successful with the others.

This program is suitable for someone with auditory difficulty as interaction is visual.

Report and Conclusions:

Print Artist Grand Suite is excellent value even if you only use the print design features. The extras in Snapshot Express, iCollect, Web Studio Express and the Artist Favorite Images make it even more useful. I expect to find all kinds of family applications for this title over the years - from school reports and personal web pages to e-cards, scrapbooks and Christmas letters. It will be staying on my desktop.