Consumer desktop publishing software or creative printing products are geared to non-designers. These products are usually low cost, easy to use, and come bundled with clip art, fonts, and craft templates. With a few exceptions, this software lacks the ability to produce output in a format suitable for commercial printing. The bulk of home publishing software is for the Windows platform.
General Purpose
These programs do it all. Filled with templates or design wizards, clip art, and fonts these packages create a wide range of projects including cards, scrapbooks, banners, and photo albums. Some software may have templates for SOHO businesses including business cards and brochures. Photo-editing utilities, word processing, and commercial printing options are sometimes part of the package.
Calendar Creation
The main purpose of these products is creating calendars of all shapes and sizes. Some programs feature appointment scheduling and planning tools while others may be simply for printing calendars.
Greeting Card Design
You can make a greeting card with most any general purpose home publishing software but these card programs feature thousands of ready-made templates, design wizards, clip art, fonts, or other extras specifically for cards, announcements, or invitations.
T-Shirt Design
These programs designed specifically for creating personalized t-shirt designs and similar projects include templates, clip art, and often come packaged with extras such as transfer paper samples or even t-shirts or other objects to accept your transfer designs.
Clip Art
While these are primarily clip art collections, they often include basic photo-editing software or other applications for home publishing use. If you already have general publishing software, buy these to expand your clip art collection but look at the bundled software as a bonus option.
