Customer Reviews

Art Explosion Greeting Card Factory Deluxe 5.0 [Old Version]

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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 There are other programs available specifically for creating cards, but most of them are low quality and outdated, and aren't really worth considering. (A competitive third product featuring American Greetings designs is sadly now long outdated).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.

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.

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.

I have used Greeting Card Factory Deluxe for quite awhile and just upgraded to 5.0. I frequently like to send electronic greetings and have done so with no problems in the previous version. In 5.0 I went to a lot of trouble to design my own electronic greeting but when I went to send it there was no option to do so. The instructions say that the option to send such a greeting is under the file menu as it was in previous versions. However, it isn't there. It isn't just greyed out. It isn't there at all. This is a disappointment to me.

The product would hang my entire machine when I tried to install. Always hung after insertion of disc 2. Couldn't even get customer no-service to consider the fact that the product disc may be defective. Very hard to even get a response to my requests. Consider another product....there are many out there.

This is an outstanding software package for making cards. I have been designing cards for a number of years using another popular product. But I needed a new, upgrade program. This has so many improvements over my old software, it's so much more fun to do cards. It is easy and fast. There is an abundant assortment of art at your fingertips. It has a huge file of sentiments. The most flexible software I've seen. My only negative comment is I'm still waiting for my rebate - over 2-1/2 months now. I would select this over my other two packages in a minute. Importing is also very easy and changing the premades is a piece of cake.

This product is amazing! I have been using it steadily since the day it arrived and my friends and co-workers can't believe it when I show them the finished products. Using my own digital photos, I've been able to make greeting cards, photo cards and even electronic greetings. I'd recommend this product for anyone interested in creating their own cards using the graphics that come with the program or photographic images of your own.

I just got my copy of this application from amazon.com. I have had the first and third version of this software and now this one. This has improved leaps and bounds. It now procures the functionality to search templates by key words. I have found this tool extremely helpful due to the fact that this software has over 20,000 cards. Another thing I particularly enjoy is the 700 new fonts that were installed on my machine. I really enjoy this software and I think others would too.

While "Greeting Card Factory Deluxe" may have plenty of graphics the program is not worth the $60 I shelled out for it. The program seems to be designed for people who just want to choose a project and print it. For example, trying to be creative with calendars is extremely difficult. Further, if you make a change on one month of the calendar (e.g. dragging the calendar days) it applies to all the months.

Too rigid! Don't buy it! I'm going to try and get my money back!

The program has some good points but does have problems printing some of the cards. For example one card I got the graphics 2 and 1/2 times or the front of the card email to tec support came back with some suggestion like get new drivers for your printer reload the software none of which helped they said call them then you sit of hold for 30 minutes. Still haven't gotten an answer. The rebate has been almost 4 months and now they say we will cut the check in a week or two. The company needs to look into it's customer service.