Easy/Fun Print Projects

One of the fun, useful and often money-saving ways we’ve used our computer is to create print projects. We make greeting cards, calendars, posters, and much more. Some print projects are part of word processing programs, but we like the creative freedom of PagePlus X5 (www.serif.com), a desktop publishing program that lets us make professional-looking stuff - and it’s easy and quick to do.

 
PagePlus X5 has nearly 1,000 templates we can customize, but you can also create your own projects from scratch. We make all our greeting cards with the templates. Just substitute our text, color and font–and Voila! A personalized, colorful card in minutes.

There are lots of projects (flyers, invitations, banners and more), and the color schemes option lets you preview projects with different combinations of colors for text, background, graphics and borders.

Those of you who are more creative will also find plenty of features to make projects from scratch. Place text on a curve, use it in any place or shape, add graphics and photos (sized, shaped and/or altered if you want), or put inside one of the many included shapes. Go wild at will.

Tool tips, onscreen help and video tutorials are there to help, or order the 300-page printed User Guide. PagePlus X5 has dozens of simple, easy projects, but the many advanced features (OK, they’ll take some time to learn) will let you creative types shine big time.