If you’re interested in exploring your untapped creativity in areas like creating your very own household newsletter; a greeting card for the holidays with your own personal touch; or even merchandising material for your business that looks professional, then Print Shop Pro 2.0 is for you.  It is targeted at consumers who have publishing requirements, but lack either the expertness or the money necessary to make use of the more complicated and expensive publishing products like InDesign, retailing for $700, or Quark.  Print Shop is both easy enough for the interested home user, and powerful enough for the small business owner who needs to be able to create letterheads; business cards; and individualized direct mailers.  The process can even be simplified to simply adjusting 1 of the many templates available to suit your needs, but you may encounter some obstacles if you want to do more than fine tune them a little.

It is a quick and easy process: if you decide that you would like to make a personalized Christmas card, for example, simply select a suitable template from out of the Project Gallery; exchange the given image with one of your family’s photographs; decide on what you would like your Christmas message to be and type it in; and print.  The entire process is accomplished in less than 10 minutes.  If promoting your small business is your intention, then a different suitable template will be selected from the Project Gallery, but the rest of the process is identical: exchange the given image with one of your own, fill out the text you want onto the template, and there you go, mission accomplished.  You can even change the template colors around if you so desire.

When creating items from the templates, Print Shop Pro is a very easy program to use, since the process consists mainly of the user dragging, dropping, and exchanging elements into the supplied templates.  The 6 tabs found on the left hand side of the screen provide access to paper size; text boxes and shapes; and the layout.  The 2 tabs on the bottom of the screen are where you access the Project and Image Galleries, and you are able to filter these in order to find what you need, but, because these are store in the Print Shop Cloud, you will need to be online in order to get to them.

There are advance features that have been added to this version, one example being layers; these come in very handy when you’re attempting to organize the various elements to your projects.  The image tray located at the bottom edge of the window allows for fast access to the images you use most often, company logos and such.  In this version you are also now able to blur effect and drop gradients and shadows to smarten your project up, and clicking on the LaunchIdeas.Project.com tab found on the home screen will take you to the ideas.project.com site, and here you can watch video tutorials and gather together ideas to help you on your project.