Are you looking for an inexpensive way to design your visiting cards, postcards, letter heads and flyers? Take a look at SpringPublisher.
SpringPublisher is a desktop-based software that allows even a non-designer to design nice looking business cards, letter heads etc. with a point-and-click interface.
To demonstrate its usage, we have tried to develop a flyer for ReviewOfWeb.
- As soon as you run the software you are provided with options to open a blank template, open template library and open an existing template. We chose to open template library.
- You are then redirected to a window where you can choose from Local template library or Web Template store. Local template library has about 7 sets of templates available while WebTemplate store has around 20 templates available which can be purchased against points.
- We chose one of the templates from Local template library and got this window. Here you have various tabs available to choose from business card/letterhead/postcard and flyer.
- We edited the text and replaced our logo with the default one. Here are the results (before publishing). All we did was truly point-and-click.
- We then saved the project and used the ‘Save As Image’ option, which rendered this output (png):
Some trivia
- The download is nearly 2.3 MB in size and it took less than 2 mins to download and install the software.
- It is available in free and paid editions. Here is a rundown to differences between the two editions.
Improvements we wish for
- Undo feature. If I have resized an image or made a spelling error, I just can’t use the usual “Ctrl-Z” to undo on my Windows machine.
- More output/export options. Most professional printers ask fro eps/ai files.
- Preview. There should be a preview feature that one could use before downloading templates from the web store. We would also like to see more variety of templates for various industries.
Final Words
The software is easy to use and works as advertised. If the above points are taken care of, we see a lot potential in Spring Publisher. Small business/bloggers/freelancers on budget can go for Spring Publisher for their day-to-day publishing needs.
Ankur Jain is a Software Engineer in Test Automation. After a 5 years stint with Accenture and Oracle, he started his eLearning company. A long-time blogger and proud owner of the "Learn" series of websites. 