Product Description

This new version of Greeting Card Factory Deluxe 5.0 has everything you need. It’s the ultimate collection of absolutely charming cards, featuring beautiful graphics and heartfelt sentiments sure to express your innermost feelings every time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3038 in Software
• Brand: Nova Development US
• Model: RAW
• Released on: 2005-10-15
• Platforms: Windows XP, Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows 98
• Format: CD-ROM
• Dimensions: 1.63 pounds

Features

• Greeting card software built on robust graphics engine
• 20,000+ exclusive greeting cards and customizable projects
• 85,000+ graphics with no downloading required; 700+ fonts
• New 4x8 photo-card projects; new interface; photo-realistic graphics
• Sophisticated drawing tools; gradient support; unparalleled text effects

From the Manufacturer
Now you can personalize and send the very best store-bought greeting cards with just one software product. This new version of Greeting Card Factory Deluxe 5.0 has everything you need. It’s the ultimate collection of absolutely charming cards, featuring beautiful graphics and heartfelt sentiments sure to express your innermost feelings every time. Because Greeting Card Factory products are the only software products among leading print creativity titles to be built on a robust graphics engine, you can achieve results never before possible. Included are sophisticated drawing tools, gradient and transparency support, unparalleled text effects, and much more. What’s more, Greeting Card Factory Deluxe 5.0 offers the biggest selection of store-quality greeting cards of any product in the category, as well as an unprecedented number of premium-quality graphics. And now, Greeting Card Factory Deluxe 5.0 includes even more impressive capabilities than ever with brand-new 4x8 photo-card projects, a new interface, and photo-realistic graphics.

Customer Reviews

Not bad, but inferior cards to the competing Hallmark greeting card program
If you decide to buy a current greeting card program, there are really only two front-line choices: Art Explosion Greeting Card Factory (currently version 5) or Hallmark Card Studio (currently 2006). There are other programs available specifically for creating cards, but most of them are low quality and outdated, and aren't really worth considering. (A competitive third product featuring American Greetings designs is sadly now long outdated).

So how do these two products match up? Without a question, if you are looking for quality "canned" cards, the Hallmark program wins. The Hallmark designs are professional, and are equal in quality to cards you would purchase in a store. In contrast, the designs in Art Explosion are adequate but surely NOT up to the quality of a store-bought card. The Hallmark program is also able to simply and correctly print to several different types of card store (although you are stuck with the choices pre-programmed into the software unless you want much frustration). The Art Explosion does a poorer job of correctly and simply printing to a variety of card stock and configurations.

Art Explosion beats the Hallmark program in editing options (more extensive), and in the amount of additional art (clipart, etc.) included with the package.

If you do not plan to use the "canned" cards, then I would recommend Art Explosion. But the average user will likely appreciate the professional, high quality cards in the Hallmark package. Personally, I consider the choice of the Hallmark package over Art Explosion a no brainer.

A note on versions: The publisher comes out with a new version of the Hallmark program every year (2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, etc.) and the same is true for Art Explosion Greeting Card Factory. Having used many of these versions, I find very little reason to recommend upgrading year by year. Disappointingly, the stock cards in the Hallmark program do not seem to have changed appreciably in many years, and the same is true for Art Explosion.

Text Editing Magic
This is the third Art Explosion product I've owned. I agree with the user who said the "canned" cards could be better, but if you're a user like me who likes to design your own projects, this is a fantastic program. It doesn't make me feel like I'm locked into presets with my hands tied, banging against a program that's not as imaginative as I am.

It's got lots of art, finally searchable in this version! The best of it loads to your hard drive, the rest is available on the disks. The art is divided into vector and raster images, one being "fine art" and the other clip art. Also, there are photographs and the ability to import your own graphics and photos. You can tint, fade, control transparency, crop, draw, even freehand...just great versitility. There's even a sentiment library to provide you with words for your occasion.

I've NEVER seen a program that has better text editing. There are preset galleries to automatically affect your text, or you can make your own using drop shadow, line and character spacing, fill with texture, three different controlable gradients, two shaping option dropdowns...it's just about limitless.

And it's so much more than cards! There are 15 major menu choices that proceed to the subfolders of choices for projects, both preset and blanks. I used the preformatted web slide shows to put together our family photo greeting for the holidays, again, easy and versitile and not a glitch in the web experience.

If there's one drawback I'd like to see Art Explosion improve on, it's the font selection process. It comes with a lot of fonts, but with no viewer or way to make a selection of which ones you want to install except to tediously wade through folder after folder of alphabetized font files, opening them to the famous "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." Other than that, this software's nearly perfect and only as limited as you are.

Disappointed
I use Hallmark Card Studio and only ordered Art Explosion to expand on my choice of greeting card templates. I will admit that Art Explosion does have a large choice of templates but the quality and sentiment expression of their card slection doesn't even approach the selection offered by Hallmark Card Studio. Art Explosion seems to have a large assortment of clip art type cards while Hallmark has a better assortment of photo type cards with traditional greeting card sentiments. I was very disappointed with my purchase and find myself using Hallmark almost exclusively with only occasional usage of Art Explosion.