Software Review of:
Print Artist 
Grande Suite 12 

Minimum requirements to run Print Artist Grande Suite are a Pentium 100 processor, 16 MB Ram, 315 MB free hard drive space, a 4X CD-ROM drive, 800 X 600 16 bit color, mouse and keyboard. The preferred requirements include the above listed items with a Pentium 200 and 32 MB Ram.

There are three installation options – minimal, recommended, and custom. I followed the recommended installation using 447 MB of hard disk space. Print Artist opens up with a Home page and three additional tabs for Pre-designed projects, Blank Projects, and Saved Projects. The Home page also has links to the ‘Getting Started Tutorial’ and the ‘Print Artist Web Site’. The projects tabs are laid out very much like Explorer with a category on the left side and sub-categories on the right side. Pre-designed projects has seven categories. I chose one – cards – and found 12 sub-categories with sixteen to ninety-nine selections in each sub-category. Blank projects is the area where your creativity can really take off. The categories include pages, Avery, banners, booklets, brochures, business cards, calendars, cards, crafts, envelopes, newsletters, postcards, and scrapbooks. Avery alone has twelve sub-categories. I thought that I would catch the program up with Avery because I was quite certain that I used an Avery card that was not in the list. Fortunately, though, it is included although it is classified “office” rather than “greeting”.

The card that I like is a half fold card that is the size of a quarter fold card, thus I can print two cards on one standard sheet of paper. This size fits in a 4 1/8 X 5 ¾ envelope and is the perfect size for a short note, a thank you, or an invitation. I chose a flower from the available graphics for the front and my logo on the back. It was necessary to do copy and paste to get the same design on the second card on the sheet. At first that did not appeal to me because the software that I had used previously had always printed two cards with a single design. In fact though this is very useful because it will be possible to create two different cards with a single printing. It is important with Print Artist to do a print preview before printing because there are other options that can be selected such as ‘print crop marks’ and ‘mirror image’. My first printing (I printed without doing a print preview) had crop marks printed on it that naturally lessened the quality of my project. My next project started again with a blank – this time I chose a ‘Z’ style tri-fold card. I used Print Artist graphics to create a birthday card for a ten-year-old born on Valentine’s day. The pink elephant, bear, cake, and hearts used together incorporate the Valentine-birthday message. My next project was a Valentine card for an adult. I chose a nice card from the pre-designs that had a simple design with a colored background and a simple message inside.

Now it was time to explore what is available for the creation of newsletters. Many organizations as well as families publish a newsletter and this software has many ideas for newsletters. In the pre-designed projects there are newsletters for every conceivable business or interest. Again though I favor the blank projects, which has a layout that would make it possible to have a heading or title and then two columns. The blank newsletter templates are available in 8.5 “X 11" and 8.5 X 14.

Print Artist version 12 seems to have unlimited choices in the pre-designed projects ranging in the categories of calendars, cards, crafts, posters and more, publications, specialty papers and stationary sets. I prefer starting with a blank project and creating from scratch. There are nine CDs filled with graphics that can be used on any kind of project. There are also a very large number of greetings/quotes that can be inserted into any project that you are working on. The greetings/quotes are easily inserted and the font and size can be changed from the font/size used in the program. I did not yet learn how to add punctuation to the quotes and I did use a quote that I thought should have some additional commas. It is also possible to use graphics from other sources. My digital camera takes pictures directly on floppy disks and I like to use my own pictures for many holiday/special cards that I send. It is also easy to insert a picture from a scanner. Print Artist 12 is well worth the listed price of $59.95 and with the current $20 rebate, it is a bargain.

I visited Best Buy, CompUSA, Office Depot, Office Max and Wal-mart looking for Print Artist Grande Suite. All of these stores carried Print Artist Gold and/or Print Artist Platinum as will as other products from Sierra Home, but I did not find Print Artist Grande Suite at any of the stores. Print Artist Grande Suite is available on the Internet for $59.95 from Sierra. Look for software catalog. Print Artist has a $20.00 manufacturer’s rebate good until September 30, 2001.