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76 of 76 found the following review helpful:
 Not bad, but inferior cards to the competing Hallmark greeting card programNov 12, 2006
By David Pearlman
"sound fanatic"
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 There are other programs available specifically for creating cards, but most of them are low quality and outdated, and aren't really worth considering. (A competitive third product featuring American Greetings designs is sadly now long outdated).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.
46 of 46 found the following review helpful:
 Text Editing MagicNov 28, 2006
By A. Albers
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.
21 of 21 found the following review helpful:
DisappointedFeb 27, 2006
By Donald R. Bartel
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.
13 of 13 found the following review helpful:
Very good except for one glitchDec 23, 2006
By Sharonf
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.
15 of 16 found the following review helpful:
 Customer NO-Service Makes this a DON'T BUYAug 12, 2006
By B. Thompson
"ComputerGeek"
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.
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based on 31 reviews
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