Table of Contents

Keeping Alive the Celebrations of Today

Turn Words And Phrases Into Works Of Art

 Review of  MyTypeArtist

Windows 95/98; Macintosh

By Joyce E. Lynn, May, 2000

Overview:

“An innovative graphics tool that quickly turns words and phrases into eye catching works of art. Contains 1,000 unique typestyles that you can easily browse by color, pattern, theme, shape and more. Add excitement to anything that you create.”

This is a very easy program that does basically only one thing very, very well: it produces fancy text headlines for use in other programs.  You merely choose the type style you like, enter your text and then save it in any one of five popular graphics formats (BMP, TIFF, JPEG, GIF or PNG).

Be prepared to spend some time playing with this program, entering different words and phrases just to see how they look in the different type styles, and getting lots of ideas for new projects.

When you open the program, you are presented with the first of 40 pages, each displaying a grid of 25 different fonts. The first screen shows the fonts indexed sequentially by page number, but clicking on the Style tab sorts the fonts by “Classic, Gothic, Modern, Color, Pattern, Effect, Texture, Clip Art, Button and Favorites (user defined),” which are then sorted into up to ten additional categories.  The Theme tab sorts by “Nature, Fashion, Food, Cities and Movies,” which are then sorted into eight additional categories.  “Favorite” fonts can be saved to your hard drive to make them easier to find, and accessible when the CD is not in the drive.

Features:

When you select a font style from either of the three views, a new window comes up. Here you type or paste in the desired word or phrase. You can change:

	Background Colors: Full range of colors in a drop-down selection window plus a typical Windows custom color selection chart so that you can enter all of the numbers of the color you want to get an exact match.
	Letter size and spacing: Selection scales to independently set the size of the letters and the space between them.
	File Formats: One or more of these graphic file formats: BMP, TIFF, JPEG, GIF, and PNG, will work in any program that will import graphics.
	Copy an Image and Paste: If your destination allows pasting from the Windows clipboard, this feature will paste your text creation directly where you want it in your composition without the need to save it to a file.
	Favorites and Bookmarks: Clicking the Bookmark button will save a font to disk and will list it in the Favorite category under the Style tab.
	Manual: Disk based 45-page color illustrated users manual in Adobe Acrobat format. Easy to find if you really run into something you can’t figure out.
	Windows compliant: If you are used to the Windows interface, this program will be totally intuitive. Everything works just the way it should.
	Bonus: There are 6653 .wmf and .jpg images in 24 categories in a Clipart directory on the CD that you can browse through with any good graphics viewer, and open and manipulate in most programs.

General Uses:

	Web art: The Pencil font, with only spaces instead of text, forms the buttons on the “Celebrations to Keep” web site. Longer pencils form part of the background for the banner at the top of each page. The title also started as a MyTypeArtist font.
	Email postcards: Create and embed a three dimensional caption in your favorite digital photo, then email it like a postcard or post it in an online photo album such as our PhotoPoint Album: California Springtime Album View and Photo View
	Design Elements: Once you have created a text selection you can save it in your choice of file formats or paste it directly into your graphics program. It is then ready to manipulate it in any way you choose with your favorite graphics program, such as Jasc PaintShopPro, Microsoft Picture It!, or Micrografx Picture Publisher, which were used for these projects.

Scrapbooking With “MyTypeArtist”:

Even with all the TrueType type styles available, it seems that we still search for “just the right one” to create that special look that we envision. “My Type Artist” provides 1000 decorative fonts that will give your Computer Aided Scrapbooking (CAS) pages a unique touch whether you wish to view them in a slideshow on your computer screen, print out the entire page or print for “cut and paste” in a traditional scrapbook.

How We Created Jasmine’s Scrapbook Page:

Microsoft Picture It! 2000 provided the collage template. Photogenic little Jasmine provided the four pretty poses. Text in the predefined text blocks tell where and when. The composition was saved in Picture It!’s .mix format

In MyTypeArtist. After trying several fonts, the three-dimensional ivory colored style seemed the most reminiscent of “credits” for the classic movie theme.

	Selecting the smallest spacing between the letters and a letter size larger than needed allowed for resizing the graphic to fit without losing quality.
	Changing this fonts original black background to a green similar to the green of the template made it easier to create a mask with a color matching selection tool and also let any little tags that didn’t select well to blend into the background.
	It is also a good idea for the next operation to set the border options to medium to keep the edges of the letters from touching the edge of the graphic and forming “pockets” that can be hard to select for the mask.
	The resulting four files, one for each line of the copy, was saved in .bmp format. (While you could “paste” directly into PictureIt!, you would have to have both programs open and switch between them for each line of text.)

In Picture It! again, open all four new BMP files and select the first one.

	Select “Cutouts & Pictures” from the vertical tool bar.
	Click “Cut out of Picture” and then “By Color Selection” on the next two screens.
	Drag the slider on the next screen to change the range of colors to “0” and click the “eye dropper” on the green background surrounding the text. The background will change to a complimentary color to indicate the selected area.
	Make sure that all of the nooks and crannies, like the inside of “o” and “e,” are included in the “mask.” (It is important to know that at this stage, only the background is selected, the next step with reverse this.) Click “Next.”
	On the next screen, click on “Select opposite area” and check the “Put your cutout in its own picture” and click “Done.”
	Repeat this procedure with each block of text.
	The resulting text blocks sitting on the bottom “filmstrip” now have no background and can be positioned as desired like any other graphic.   The .wmf image of the Oscar statue from the Bonus clipart collection in the “Entertainment” category seemed a nice, quick finishing touch. It already had a transparent background so no additional processing was needed to paste and position two copies into the composition.   View the finished Jasmine Scrapbook page in our Celebrations to Keep Art Gallery. The Picture It! template is designed to be printed as a twelve by twelve inch page, much too large to be viewed without scrolling on a computer screen, so the image was reduced to 40% of the original.

Comparisons:

	The only other software of this type was developed for the fast growing craft of Scrapbooking. Other font programs usually entail manipulating True Type fonts already installed in your system’s font directory.
	MySoftware did not seem to have any particular artistic discipline in mind when they developed this program, so there are fonts to fit just about any project you can imagine. (See samples.)
	MyTypeArtist has over 60 times the number of type styles as the popular Scrapbook lettering CDs, which generally have about fifteen fonts each.
	There are no creativity inspiring, pre-lettered “toppers” or cute phrases.
	There are no outlined, “print and color it yourself,” provisions

Likes & Dislikes:

There is a lot to like in this very limited tool. It is exceedingly easy to use. You can give your creativity free rein and experiment with applying various font effects to a headline, phrase or sentence against different background colors, then save the result for use as is, or do additional processing in another program.

You must keep in mind the effect you want and the area you intend to fill, because a line of text will not wrap. You will have to save each segment of a multi-lined block of text separately and assemble it manually in your document.

Likes:

	Text can be saved in a variety of file formats so most programs can import them with ease.
	Background colors can be changed to match or contrast with the destination.
	Text can be spaced and sized to fit the destination.
	The clipart collection is a valuable bonus that is usable and well organized, but you need your own browser to view it.
	Options allow you to choose the amount of background area to save with the text.
	You don’t have to install the entire set of fonts (over 300mb) in your Windows font directory or anywhere else on your hard drive.

Dislikes:

	The fonts do not have names or numbers, only coordinates on the indexed screens. There is no way to search for a font, or even find one again easily, unless you make a note of screen number and grid location.
	Only one line of text can be saved at a time, so that you have to make each line in a block of text a separate graphic file, and then position them individually in your composition.
	The program always opens in default mode, set to use the “Saved” folder in the program directory, and has to be reset each session to save somewhere else.
	The background color cannot be set as a global option; each font must be changed each time it is accessed.
	The program MUST be unlocked with a registration code from their web site by the fifth time you open it or it threatens to stop working (very annoying).
	CD must be in the machine to be able to use the fonts, unless you have saved favorites.

Feedback:

Have an opinion about this product? Love it? Hate it? Have a great example of a unique use for it that you’d like share in our Guest Art Gallery? Have a trick or tip on it to share? We’d love to hear from you.

E-mail your feedback about this review or program to mytypeartist@celebrations.com

Systems Requirements:

Purchasing Information:

MyTypeArtist, published by MySoftware, retails at $19.95 and is available online from the MySoftware web site, and at “brick & mortar” computer and office supply stores nation-wide.

Buy it now through this link for $14.99!

Microsoft PictureIt! 2000 is available from Beyond.com for $21.99 (after a $20.00 rebate).

Paint Shop Pro v6.0 is available from Beyond.com for $65.99.

Links:

Celebrations to Keep Art Gallery: Examples and Illustrations from our Product Reviews.

The California Springtime album on PhotoPoint:
Album view   Photo view

Manufacturer: MySoftware / ProVenture Publishing

This review was adapted from an article published in Bobbi Rosenstein's iwannabe Scrapbooking DAILY Newsletter.
Visit the iwannabe Scrapbooking web site.

 

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Copyright © 2000 DYNAMIC Alternatives
Last modified: May 12, 2000