With the right fonts and the right art, most computer users should be able to make their own holiday cards at a reasonable price, of a quality equal to most professional cards, and with unique personal touches you can't buy in a store.

To start with, you will need some inexpensive and easily acquired items. You'll need a good color ink-jet printer - Cannon, Hewlett Packard and Lexmark all make good quality printers at reasonable prices, but we particularly recommend Epson printers. You will need 70# or 80# 8.5x11 inch paper (may be called Bristol or card stock) in a light, neutral color (white, ivory or buff) which you can write and print on. In addition, for the best results you should also get photo-quality ink-jet paper, a blade-style paper cutter and spray adhesive (we recommend 3M's Super 77 brand - identical to their more expensive SpraMount brand, but more likely to be found in a hardware store than a craft or art store). You will also need a graphics editing program like Adobe Photoshop, ColorIt or Paintshop Pro (available on our utilities page)

Start by selecting the image you want to use on the front of your card. You can find lots of good art to work with in our holiday package (CLICK HERE). For the ideal result, shrink and/or crop your image to reduce it to a size of about 3.75 x 5 inches. In your graphics program lay out 4 copies of the image in a square on your page. Print this on your printer on photo quality paper using the photo-quality setting and highest quality. Once the print has dried, cut the four images apart and lay them aside temporarily.

Now you want to do the text portion of the card. This can be done well in a layout program like Quark Express or Adobe Pagemaker, but for a small job like this a good graphics program will do just fine. Start by creating a document that is a full 8.5x11 inches in size. Pick attractive fonts for your greeting and type it in appropriate colors. Once you have the text you will need to flip it upside down and position it in the upper left quadrant of your layout. You will probably also want to do a signature, credit, copyright or return address and put it in the lower left quadrant of the page, right-side up.

As an enhancement to your greeting, you might want to use decorative initials and colorize them. Using a dark color for the letter and lighter colors for the surrounding decorations usually works best and is easy to do using the paint bucket tool. For more information on how to do this, see our article on decorative initials (CLICK HERE).

Next, fold your card in half along the shorter dimension. Then fold it in half again along the new short dimension, so that with a blank side on top if you open one fold the greeting is right-side up behind it. Take one of the images you printed earlier, spray the back lightly with spray adhesive and apply it, nicely centered, to the blank front side of the card. See the diagram above for details on folding.

At this point your card is complete. We recommend using the inside front page as a place to write a personal message. The double-folded structure of the card makes it more sturdy and helps it stand on its own more effectively. For mailing, use a standard 5x6 card envelope.).

If you're less concerned about appearance than simplicity and cost, instead of using expensive photo-quality paper, you can print your image directly on the card. Just add the image to the lower-right quadrant of your layout before printing.

And, of course, for the best results you will probably want to use some of the great holiday fonts and images in our Holiday CD collection. For info and free samples, click here: HOLIDAY FONTS & ART.