Hallmark Connections Card Studio

Never Miss A Chance to Say You Care

A Review of Hallmark Connections Card Studio

by Grace Smith

Hallmark Connections Card Studio is an easy and fun way to create personalized cards, invitations, signs, certificates, and announcements.

Offering more than 1,000 pre-designed cards featuring Hallmark artwork and messages, Card Studio provides a series of enjoyable and creative tools for designing personal greetings.

A new concept in personal expression products, Card Studio invites users to select artwork, messages, fonts, and imported images such as family photos or freehand drawings. A joint development between Hallmark Cards, Inc., the world’s largest manufacturer of greeting cards, and Micrografx, Inc., an industry leader in technical graphics software, Card Studio empowers people of all ages to create high-quality, personalized sentiments on their home computers.

Along with the ability to create and customize cards for any occasion, Card Studio includes several well-designed and thoughtful features to enhance your personalized messages. A unique Event Minder and Address Book allow you to record birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, and other occasions along with the names and addresses of relatives and friends. You can also import names and addresses stored in other programs, view and print calendars by the month, and create notes for any day.

The Card Rack is organized like a greeting card display rack in your favorite store. Here you can search for pre-designed cards by category, choose a card, and personalize it by adding your own touches. The Card Finder allows another way to search for cards, announcements, or invitations by letting you combine several categories to choose a card. The Message Book contains greeting card messages that appear on the cards in the Card Rack. You can find and choose the message you want and paste it into your card of choice.

In the Studio, you can create original cards, invitations, announcements, signs, and certificates. You can also customize any choices from the Card Rack by taking them into the Studio for redesign. You can punch up the appearance and layout of your message, resize, rotate, or crop it, and select the font and colors you like best. You can use drawing tools to create interesting shapes and lines, adding symbols, photos, graphics, and your own touches to each design.

In addition to cards, invitations, and announcements, Card Studio includes a variety of attractive screen savers created by Hallmark artists. You can configure the Screen Gallery to select and deselect the artwork you want to use and specify the percentage of screen the screen saver will use.

Card Studio offers a series of fun and intuitive tools for designing cards for any occasion. Whether you are a novice, a sophisticated graphics expert, or somewhere in between, the artwork, messages, and graphics technology in Card Studio will empower you to produce electronic card designs with superb results. By using Card Studio, you’ll be in the artist’s seat to make the kind of card you want, in the style you like, on your own computer.

1996, Grace Smith, Ph.D., for InfoMedia.

Multimedia Cafe Scorecard

Product:	Hallmark Connections Card Studio
Company:	Micrografx, Inc. 1303 East Arapaho Road Richardson, TX 75081
Cost:	$49.99

System Requirements:

Windows 3.1 or Windows 95
386 DX IBM-compatible PC
6 MB RAM
256-color or higher graphics display
A hard disk with 10 MB free space
A CD-ROM drive
Mouse

Breakdown:

EASE OF USE 5
LEARNING VALUE 5
ENTERTAINMENT VALUE 5
GRAPHICS 5
SOUND None

Overall Score: