Spiffing Up Presentations Is Easy With the Right Graphics Software
Having a good printer is half the battle in adding pizazz to your business presentations, signage and correspondence. You also need graphics software and a source for “clip art.”
The demand for business-oriented graphics has prompted a couple of software vendors to create special business editions of their popular consumer graphics editing programs. Adobe’s PhotoDeluxe Business Edition is an enhanced version of PhotoDeluxe that includes extra templates, photos and clip art to create marketing and sales materials.
Likewise, SOHO (Small Office Home Office) from LivePix provides extra tools to make it easier for small businesses to create compelling fliers, business cards, stationery, envelopes, postcards and labels.
SOHO is organized by projects. When you start the program, you’re asked to select a ready-made or new project. If you select ready-made, you choose from a series of templates that you can use as a basis for your creation. The sample projects come with their own art, or you can substitute your own graphics. You can start with one project and later create another based on the same art.
Let’s say you are getting ready to launch a fall sale. You could peruse the sample projects to see if you can find an appropriate one, substitute your own photos or art if necessary and begin by creating a flier. Then you could use the same art to create a postcard to send to customers and a special business card about the sale to hand out to people. You could also convert the graphics into a format suitable for posting on a Web site and, finally, you could use the program to send out a postcard via e-mail that contains the graphic you selected.
Sending out an e-mail with the graphic is easy because LivePix SOHO comes with a copy of Novita LiveLetter, an e-mail program for sending out graphics and electronic greetings. Simply select “send-e-mail” from the LivePix menu and the program launches LiveLetter with your graphic ready to send. The recipient gets an e-mail attachment that he or she can run to view your message.
While this is a neat idea, it should be used with caution. E-mail messages that contain graphics take longer to download. Lots of people hate any kind of unsolicited commercial e-mail, especially those that download slowly.
Having access to ready-made photos and art is fine, but there are times when what you really want is a picture of yourself or other staff members, your products, your office or something else that’s specific to your business.
Fortunately, LivePix is also a very good image editor, which means it can be used to re-size, crop, sharpen, rotate and otherwise manipulate photos and other graphic images. In addition to letting you use scanned photos or pictures you take with a digital camera, LivePix also supports Kodak’s Picture Network, PhotoNet and other services that photo processors use to convert exposed film or negatives to digital images.
Once you have your graphic looking great, it’s easy to integrate it into the project you’re creating. First you select a graphic in the ready-made project that you don’t want, then click on your graphic and click on “substitute.” It removes the canned art and replaces it with your photo. The real genius of the project is the “opacity” and “edge” controls, which cause your graphic to blend into the project so it looks like it was specifically designed to go where you placed it.
Adobe PhotoDeluxe Business Edition is based on a similar concept. Although the program itself is the same as the consumer edition, the business version comes with templates and projects designed for small business, including business cards, labels, stationery, report covers, coupons and retail displays.
Like LivePix, PhotoDeluxe is also a full-featured image-editing program that can be used to create or edit graphics for both printed documents and the Web. The program also has a feature that lets you create iron-on transfers for T-shirts for those who want to wear their logos on their chest. The presentations area of the product allows you to create attractive displays with drop shadows, backgrounds and special effects.
The program has lots of great photo-editing features, including red-eye removal and tools that allow you to restore damaged photos. You can also use the program to create a screen name, which can be a useful way to promote your product or business.
Each of these products comes with sample art, but when it comes to finding art for your business, you need as many options as possible. There are numerous companies that sell clip art on CD-ROM including Broderbund, which makes an entire family of ClickArt CDs with just about every type of imaginable image. The $59.95 ClickArt 200,000 Image Pak is probably the best value.
Personally, I don’t like having to insert a CD every time I’m looking for an image, so I recently subscribed to a Web-based service called Art Today (https://www.arttoday.com) that for $17.95 a year gives you access to 750,000 images that you can use in a printed product or on your Web site. The online database is organized by subject and is searchable, making it easy to find the image you want. You can find plenty of free clip art on the Web by searching for “clip art” in Yahoo or other major search engines.
Although products like LivePix and PhotoDeluxe make it easy to create your own projects, they don’t guarantee that your creation will look good or be effective. As always, use good judgment, avoid mixing fonts or using garish colors and get feedback on your creations before you unleash them on the world.
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Find out more about small business and technology at The Times’ Small Business Strategies Conference Oct. 17-18 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. You can e-mail Lawrence J. Magid at magid@latimes.com and visit his Web site at https://www.larrysworld.com. On AOL, use keyword “LarryMagid.”
