If you are going to use Print Explosion Deluxe, better buy more ink for your inkjet. You’ll probably go through lots of ink and paper if you play with it as much as I (and especially my bidding artist daughter, Katie) have.
If you use your Mac in a home, school or SOHO (small office-home office) environment, Print Explosion Deluxe could well be the only application you’ll need for print projects and document creation. With it, you can create greeting cards, calendars, banners and much more. The package contains over 8,800 designs (including 3,000 greeting cards), 90,000 premium-quality graphics, 5,000-plus photos, 2,500 fine art images, and 500 TrueType fonts. And you get all this for US$59.95.
What’s more, the latest version of Print Explosion is Mac OS X native — though it will run on Mac OS 7.6.1 through 9.2 with the CarbonLib extensions installed. Designed exclusively for the Mac, Print Explosion Deluxe packs a number of new features. A new Application Assistant lets users customize their designs from within the Assistant; users can now integrate a database of names and addresses to create mailing labels; a new Quotation Database lets users choose one of 8,500 contemporary quotations to use in any project; improved label support means you can create multiple labels and move through the designs making custom changes to any single label.
Other new features include: mail merge for integrating names and addresses in mailing labels; a quotation database with over 8,500 entries; beefed up label support; enhanced EPS support with higher quality EPS images; with a new “Publish to HTML” feature you can build Web pages; and using the new E-Mail Greeting category, users can now publish designs and e-mail them using any popular Mac e-mail application.
Print Explosion Deluxe is well designed and very easy to use. I’ve used it to make ads for my church and custom CD labels for use with iTunes. And Katie has used it to make birthday and greeting cards. But you can also use it for t-shirt designs, signs & posters, flyers, banners, certificates, invitations, calendars, labels, letterheads, envelopes, business cards, fax cover sheets, report covers, postcards, party sets, gift tags, bookmarks, crafts, electronic greetings, mousepads and more.
When you launch Print Explosion Deluxe, you’ll be prompted to choose what sort of project (cards, banners, envelopes, etc.) you wish to work on. Then you must choose an example of something that appeals to you. Then you’re presented with options for customizing the text, importing images, even adding quotations. If there’s a single drawback to Print Explosion Deluxe, it’s that the number of options can be overwhelming. But better too much good stuff than too little.
To use Print Explosion Deluxe, you’ll need a Power Mac with 16MB of available RAM and a CD-ROM drive. You don’t have to have a printer, but you’ll certainly want one.
If you’re looking for a user-friendly, cost effective program that will let you create pretty much any kind of document most of us will ever need, you’ll definitely want to check this out.
By the way, if you’re running Print Explosion Deluxe on Mac OS 10.1, be sure to download an update patch for Print Explosion. You’ll need it for the software to load in the OS update.