The Print Shop Deluxe Ensemble II
By Vade Forrester

 The Print Shop Deluxe Ensemble II, which I shall refer to hereafter as PSD Ensemble II, make it easy to create a number of common printed formats: greeting cards, signs & posters, banners, certificates, calendars, labels, and extras. The extras denote utilities like name lists for merges, graphics export so you can use PSD Ensemble II graphics elsewhere, and smart graphics, which feature some graphic and typographic enhancements.

Speaking of graphics, PSD Ensemble II, which ships on a CD-ROM, has a lot of them. While the Setup program writes program files onto your hard drive, you still must have the CD-ROM in its drive for the program to work.To use PSD Ensemble II, you start by selecting a project from a screen which offers eight choices ). Let’s say we want to prepare a flyer for our company (Acme Widgets) picnic. We choose Signs & Posters, and get another screen asking if we want to use a ready- made sign (with all graphics already loaded) or start from scratch. Scan the ready-made signs to see if there’s one that you can adapt easily. I usually find them very limited, and create a poster from scratch.

Next, pick tall (portrait) or wide (landscape) orientation for the sign. You will see a choice of several background graphics. The Barbecue 2 image is pretty suitable for a picnic, so let’s choose it. Now PSD Ensemble II offers us a choice of predefined layouts, with previews of how they would look superimposed on your specific background graphic. But you don’t have to use a predefined layout; instead, you can create your own. Let’s choose the Barbecue 2 2 layout for our example. Now we need to add text. The layout has provided some placeholders for our text, and all we need to do is double-click on the placeholder and enter the text. There’s a curved headline placeholder where we can type in our picnic notice; and a text placeholder where we can enter the details of the picnic. There is a separate screen for entering text, which shows the text in a system font. There are also controls for selecting fonts, justification, effects like shadowing, and color. Although there is also a preview button, it only shows the selected font, not a full preview. I would like to see the text displayed on the screen as it will finally appear. You can also “gray out” the background graphic so it doesn’t overwhelm text written over it.

If you have a color printer, PSD Ensemble II will generate attractive color signs; otherwise, it will convert the sign to gray scale so you can print it on a black and white printer. You can control the amount that the background is faded. Once you have entered the text, clicking on OK will show you the final sign. If the standard layout doesn’t hold all your text, you can click on the placeholder, then on its “handle,” and drag it to a larger size. You can also move the placeholder around on the page by clicking and dragging. So in our example, we can enlarge the placeholder, since our text overflowed the standard size. We also move the headline placeholder up to make it easier to read the body text.

This is our final product; not bad for a couple of minutes’ work.This simple example shows the PSD Ensemble II’s basic features and approach. The same approach is used for other formats: select either a ready-made design, or pick design elements from a list of possibilities, all of which are previewed before you select them. Text is easy to enter and to customize to your liking. If you don’t like the clipart included with PSD Ensemble II, you can import other images in TIF, BMP, WMF, EPS, or PhotoCD format. I would have preferred the list of formats included PCX files, but it’s easy to convert them to BMP files with Windows 95’s Paint program, or Window 3.1’s PaintBrush program.

There are also other graphic placeholders, including lines, frames, columns, square graphics, and seals. Each type of placeholder comes with an assortment of prefab clipart. There’s even a collection of canned verses for greeting cards. I used PSD Ensemble II to print business cards, address labels, greeting cards, letterhead, calendars, and certificates. All produce attractive documents. The merge feature lets you print multiple copies of a document with different names inserted. For example, you might want to present a certificate to each member of a Little League team. After designing the basic certificate, you could use the merge feature to insert a different team member’s name to produce personalized certificates. You can also use PSD Ensemble II to print mailing labels, although the process is a little hard to figure out, and you must enter the names and addresses into PSD Ensemble II, so you can’t use an existing mailing list from Excel or Access. But those programs let you print labels directly, so you wouldn’t need PSD Ensemble II.

 To be honest, I found most of the ready made designs useless. They just don’t say what I want to say. Similarly, the backdrop graphics, which just clutter up the design. The layouts are useful, although you can customize so easily the prefab layouts are not really essential, either. But if you find them helpful, they are there.I found PSD Ensemble II to be a worthy successor to earlier Print Shop programs. It’s easy to learn, not too cumbersome to use, and produces attractive output. The basic layouts are imaginative and cover many common formats. Although the program uses Windows capabilities well, it still requires separate text entry screens instead of what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) displays, which takes more work. Street price for PSD Ensemble II is $50.