Design & Print Reviewer's Comments

Design & Print Business Edition by Avanquest allows you to create and print newsletters, flyers, letterheads, envelopes, business cards, greeting cards and postcards for home or small business use.

Ease of Use:  

Design & Print Business Edition is easy to install and use, though its templates and tools for creating projects need some work. None of the templates come with pre-written text and the images are all clipart. We would like to see Design & Print Business Edition include a wider variety of professional-looking templates.

Projects:  

There is the area where Design & Print Business Edition needs the most improvement. While it does offer a few business-type projects along with some basic projects like flyers, greeting cards and postcards, overall the number of different projects is very limited. It also lacks the marketing tools our top-ranked desktop publishing software Art Explosion Publisher Pro offers, such as color advertisements and direct mailers.

Photo/Graphic Tools:  

Design & Print Business Edition comes with a few thousand clipart images and backgrounds; the additional advertised 5 million images are available through a third-party supplier, and even then you only have one month of free access and need to manually download the images.

When you're working with photos, the only tools Design & Print Business Edition includes are the ability to adjust the brightness and color, rotate an image (this doesn't work as well as higher-ranked products) and invert, emboss or blur an image.

Text Tools:  

Other than inserting some decorative headings and creating your own headings by applying color, different fonts, shadows and shapes, you can't really do much with the body text like you can with other desktop publishing programs.

Printing/Sharing:  

The basic printing and sharing features included in Design & Print Business Edition include setting a print alignment and sending your document to an email recipient.

Help/Support:  

Accessing help and support with Design & Print Business Edition can be frustrating. Phone support doesn't come cheap: $24.95 for the first ten minutes and $2.95 for each additional minute. If you happen to be placed on hold during this process, it can get expensive.

We also had difficulty finding an email contact for support.

Summary:  

Overall, we were disappointed with Design & Print Business Edition. We were hoping for a better selection of professional templates which we could simply edit the text and photos.