Several years ago, we picked up a nice piece of software from Nova Development called Art Explosion Greeting Card Factory. We've been very happy with it, try to keep up with new version releases, and as a result have probably purchased no more than five preprinted greeting cards in that time. Jennifer uses it fairly often, but I don't. As such, it's been a while since I made a card.
As I've told folks in real life as well as on some of the LinkedIn groups of which I'm a member, most software does so many different things that there will always be something you don't know, and the easiest way to learn software is by using it. And so it went with me yesterday- I could have asked Jennifer to make the card for me, and she probably would have. She also would probably have made a nicer card... but as toddlers often say, "I can do it MYSELF!"
Well, there's that, but more than that, I wanted to show the recipient that I could do a thing or two with graphics, layout and text. So, I sat down and began to create. In addition to not being the resident expert and not doing this very often, this was also a new version of the software which I had never used before.
I left the inside for last, as there would only be a short note and a piece of clipart there and started on the front, setting the card to landscape. I found a very nice picture on Google and pulled it in, resized it and sent it to the back. Next, I checked for the exact verbiage and put a nice quote on top as a headline, and changed the color of the font. Finally, I grabbed a few other images off of the internet and saved everything. I went back to the internet and grabbed a few nice fonts. Since I haven't done any of this in some time, I learned that I should have grabbed the fonts first. I saved my card and closed the program.
I added the fonts to the Windows fonts directory and reopened my card. Instead of my beautiful art, there were diagonal neon green and orange stripes! Feathers ruffled but undaunted, I asked Mr. T what graphics editor he preferred. I was going to use GIMP, but I recalled both he and Amanda didn't like GIMP- he suggested Paint.net. Back to the desk... download Paint.net. Redownload both images, crop the smaller one and save them as individual .jpeg's. Satisfied, I reinserted the background, cloned the smaller one a few times, positioned the clones and saved. Then, I added a bunch of text to the back cover and formatted, positioned and saved the project. This time I printed it, and closed the program.
I was pleased with the proof copy, so I opened up the Save again. Images were gone, and stripes were back. I needed to get this card off in the morning, so I got rid of the stripes, pulled the images back in and repositioned everything. I added some clipart and text to the inside, saved and printed it. I was happy with the result. Time from start to finish (including searches, downloads and installs): around five hours... but it was a fun and satisfying five hours!
Lastly, a data update. I'm in a particularly unpleasant bit of data entry right now- absolutely no copying is possible. For all you AFOL's (Adult Fans Of Lego- and yes, that's a real acronym and definition) out there, I'm in the 3005 01x01x01 elements. The ones that have printing on them. I'm not sure exactly how many I did, but it seemed like a few hundred!
That's all for now- I have a card to mail!
As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.
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