Print Explosion is touted as the “fastest, easiest way to create greeting cards, signs, banners and more,” and for once that’s not just marketing hype. In less than ten clicks of the mouse button, you can be well on your way to printing attractive cards, calendars, labels, or any other number of crafts. If you’re looking for high art, look elsewhere, but if you’re looking for an extensive yet simple-to-use publishing suite, Print Explosion is it. With 50,000 graphics (many of which are cheesy cartoonish drawings), 500 fonts, and more than 4,000 templated designs, Print Explosion is bursting with creative options.
More impressive than the huge number of resources provided is the intuitive navigation. The main menu features a dozen icons representing the different types of products you can make, from envelopes to business cards to fax cover sheets to greeting cards. Click any one of these for a hst of template options — anything from a Christmas winter scene to a birthday card cat. Once you pick a template, you can tinker with any part of it by simply double-clicking any of the preplaced elements (unless you’ve chosen a blank template). This presents another window in which you can choose a new graphic from a long, categorized menu; import your own graphic; or alter the text by either changing what it says or picking new fonts, effects, and colors. You can also insert new graphics and text boxes, as well as shapes, via one of two floating palettes (the other one is for color).
If at any time you run into problems, you can consult the massive manual that comes with the product. Not only is the manual written so that a first grader could comprehend it, it also contains pictures of every single graphic included with the program so that you can locate the one you want to use by flipping through pages rather than clicking through a long onscreen list.
Also useful are the clear printing instructions. For instance, the program tells you when you need to turn the paper over to print the inside of a greeting card. And unlike other consumer applications, Print Explosion includes full support for EPS graphics, even for printers that don’t support PostScript.
Unfortunately, such a graphics-heavy program means taxing system requirements, including the need for almost 200MB of free disk space — and that’s with only 7,000 of the graphics installed on the hard drive (you must access the rest from the CD), Also, on a poky Power Mac 7200/120, the program took 20 minutes to install.
If you’ve decided this is the year you’re going to get crafty with your holiday cards, then take a close look at Print Explosion. It’s easy to use, a great value, and it’ll have you sending out cards faster than you can sign your name.
Lu, Cathy. (November 1999). Print Explosion 1.0. MacAddict. (pg. 78).
Nova Development
Applications
out of 10 (0 vote)
9 / 
2015-08-13 / 
f0a0b31cfc685def1b92642b0bd994a388699c8a / 
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Print_Explosion.iso_.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
