FanCraftic was founded by Valerie Randall, a seasoned graphic designer, creative director, commercial illustrator and fine artist with more than 20 years of entrepreneurial and creative experience.
Randall’s key commercial clients have included Broderbund, Lingual House, Sandia National Laboratories, Charles Schwab, Levi Strauss, Addison Wesley, AT&T and Pacific Bell to name but a few.
Notably, she is credited with producing visual and copy content for many of Broderbund® Software’s best selling product packages, including The Print Shop®, PhotoPro, PrintMaster®, American Greetings® CreataCard®, ClickArt®, and others.
Intimate knowledge of these user-friendly productivity tools has given her a unique depth of knowledge of their creative possibilities, including a collection of user shortcuts and production tips. This knowledge, together with a lifetime of artistic inspiration and experience culminates in FanCraftic Party Crafts, the first in her series of over twenty computer craft books.
As founder of FanCraftic, she contributes her own sophisticated design sense to her project designs and party sets, resulting in a look and feel that’s a cut above the work of other computer craft books.
Randall, a self-taught illustrator, has been honing her artistic skills since high school. At the age of 23, she launched her first small business enterprise after her work began attracting the attention of paying customers. An impressive career followed, with Randall becoming the principle of two successful Bay Area design firms and a five-year stint teaching at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco.
So how did this idea for a series of books begin? Randall has always felt that people are interested in how things are created, a hunch that might have come from her years of teaching. Even the staff at Broderbund is surprised at the things she creates with their products, and she wanted to share these ideas and tricks with you, too.
This first in a series of books is her idea of how to make the most of Broderbund’s software. Randall wanted to show how much fun creative publishing software can be, especially when combined with crafting. The results are all here for you to play with. Amend them, add to them, and most of all, have fun with them.
