Make your own Valentine's Day cardsIf you think you've got it tough on Valentine's Day, consider your poor, humble
Download.com editor. My wife's
birthday is on Valentine's Day! We've been together long enough that I don't need to impress her with dozens of roses, buckets of chocolates, and the rest of the conventional commercial holiday paraphernalia. However, a homemade card is always a great way to demonstrate my love.
Creating your own Valentine's Day cards with commercial design software like
Adobe Photoshop or
CorelDRAW will provide you with a wide array of options for tweaking your images, text, and graphics. Those programs also offer instructional assistance to help you through the process.. However, if you're willing to use a little elbow grease and your imagination, you can create a fantastic Valentine's Day card using free design software.
For this tutorial, I'm going to use
Paint.NET, a top-rated download that offers many of the important features that you'll find in commercial image editors.
GIMP is another excellent free program that actually offers a bit more power in terms of third-party plug-ins and online tutorials, but I find that Paint.NET is an easier program for new users to learn.
Also, I'm going to create a basic Valentine's Day card that includes an image with overlaid text and the date on the front, and some graphic elements and romantic sentiments on the inside. If you're the artistic sort and can create your own graphics, more power to you. One good free app for doing so is the vector-illustration software
Inkscape. I'm artistically incompetent, so I tend to focus on using cool pictures and injecting some wit into my text...(
read more)
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