Mountaincow Monthly (July 2007)

HOME · MOUNTAINCOW MONTHLY NEWSLETTER (JULY 2007) The hot summer months are here, and July’s issue has great design ideas for summer entertaining and staying in touch. Invite your friends over for a meal al fresco with our great summer dinner party invitations. Feeling too hot and tired to handle the chore of paying the bills? Our return address stickers will make sure the electric company envelope arrives in style. Is your busy summer schedule making it difficult to keep in touch with friends? Use our personalized stationery to send a beautiful note. Feeling festive? Throw a Hawaiian-themed luau for a big celebration. Check out tips on downloading projects, borderless printing and more in our Newsletter Notes section.

Dinner al fresco Time seems to pass much more quickly during the short summer months, and before you know it every weekend seems to be booked. If your crazy schedule has you frazzled, take some time to relax with friends on your patio, or have a picnic on the lawn. If you’re dining at a table, we included place cards in each project to allow you to orchestrate the seating. Relaxing outside is so refreshing, you won’t mind having to do the dishes when dinner is over. If you’re in the mood for a New England lobster fest, try our PrintingPress design, which uses White / Deep Red Front Scalloped A7 Two Tone stationery. We printed a red lobster at the top of the White 4-bar Scalloped card, and added the invitation text in black using the Benjamin font from Fonts & Graphics 2. We printed the guests’ names on White Scalloped place cards. For a sophisticated evening, try our Platinum design. We added a background image of a leafy tree to the Avocado A7 card. We added the text “Please join us for dinner al fresco” in the Alyssa Afternoon from Fonts & Graphics for Weddings above the tree. We added the rest of the invitation text using the Alyssa Afternoon and Benjamin Caps fonts from Fonts & Graphics for Weddings and nestled the text beneath the branches of the tree. Slip into a Chocolate A7 envelope lined in Avocado and you’re ready to start cooking. We added the same tree to the background of the matching Avocado place card. For a more casual BBQ or get-together on the patio, try our PrintingPress Extreme 4.0 design, which uses White / Deep Red A7 stationery. We filled the entire background of the White A7 card with a herringbone brick pattern. We used a floating text box to add the invitation text to the card using the Ryan font. We turned off the Make White Transparent setting on the text box and set the Opacity to 50 so that you can see the brick pattern through the text box. We added a custom border to the text box to define the edges against the brick. We added the same brick pattern to the White place card using a shape object filled with the same brick pattern. Since we needed to use borderless printing for the place card and we needed to trick the printer into printing onto the 3.5 x 4 inch place card, we made the place card flat instead (of folded) so that we could turn on the Feed stationery bottom-first setting.		PrintingPress sample (click to enlarge) PrintingPress Platinum sample (click to enlarge) PrintingPress Extreme 4.0 sample (click to enlarge)
PrintingPress Extreme 4.0 sample (click to enlarge)	Return to sender With PrintingPress Extreme 4.0, you can create beautifully addressed envelopes with ease. But when you’re paying bills, you are usually given an envelope to use for remittance. No problem! Our fabulous return address stickers make it easy for you to quickly get the job done. We used standard ½ x 1 ¾ inches labels (80 per sheet) that you can find in most office supply stores. Since our designs are meant to bleed over the edge of the labels, we increased the width of the label by 1/8” and decreased the full sheet left margin by 1/16” to give some extra room for bleed. Our first design uses the custom border feature to create a decorative blue strip at the left edge of the sticker. We used a floating text box to add the first letter of your last name in white using the Ryan font atop the blue strip. We set the left margin of the label to 0.625 inches to leave room for the initial and the custom border, and then added the name and address in the main text area in blue using the Benjamin Strong font from Fonts & Graphics 2. For tips on creating the custom border, see this month's Extreme Tip. For a clean, modern look, try our second design. We filled the background of the label in green, then added a custom border with the shape set to Line (Top) to add a strip of brown across the center of the label. We added the name and address in white using the Benjamin Caps font from Fonts & Graphics for Weddings We set the horizontal alignment to Justify to make the text fill a rectangle in the center of the label.
Summer stationery With the summer weeks flying by so quickly, it can be easy to fall behind in correspondence with friends. We’ve got great new personalized stationery designs to help you keep everyone up to date. Our PrintingPress design features our Icicle stationery. We added a geometric design in blue to the top of the Blue A7 card and then added the name in the same blue using the Alyssa font from Fonts & Graphics for Weddings. We repeated the geometric design beneath the name, flipping it vertically to mirror the image above. We added the same design to the front of the Blue A2 folded note card. Both envelopes are lined in Blue. Feeling tropical? Try our Platinum design, which uses our Avocado stationery. We added the name to the top of the Avocado A7 card in brown using the Noodles Strong font from Fonts & Graphics 3. We added a large brown hibiscus flower floating image and dragged it down to the bottom right corner of the card so that it bleeds off the edge of the card a bit. We added the same flower to the front of the Avocado 4-bar folded note card. We used a floating text box to add the name to the bottom left corner of the card. Both Chocolate envelopes are lined in Avocado. We scattered flowers across our PrintingPress Extreme 4.0 design. We created the flowers using the shape feature – each flower is a combination of a circle for the center and several rotated ovals for the petals. We grouped the shapes into a single grouped object, then used the Background Color button in the Text toolbar to change the fill color for each flower. We added the same flowers across the top of the White A7 card and the White 4-bar folded note. The flowers on the folded note card flow onto the back of the card as well. We added the name in brown using the Benjamin Caps font from Fonts & Graphics for Weddings, and increased the horizontal spacing for an airy look. We lined the chocolate envelopes in Pink.		PrintingPress sample (click to enlarge) PrintingPress Platinum sample (click to enlarge) PrintingPress Extreme 4.0 sample (click to enlarge)
PrintingPress sample (click to enlarge) PrintingPress Platinum sample (click to enlarge) PrintingPress Extreme 4.0 sample (click to enlarge)	Aloha! Special events during the summer call for big outdoor celebrations. If you’ve got an engagement to toast, a birthday to celebrate, or a new home to fête, why not throw a big luau? Our stunning invitations featuring the hibiscus flower will have guests arriving ready to party! Our PrintingPress design features our Guava Scalloped stationery. We added a green hibiscus to the top of the Pink Scalloped A6 card. We added the invitation text in the same green using the Meegles font from Fonts & Graphics 3. Slip the invitation into the Clover envelope lined in Pink and you’re set. For a wild evening, try our Platinum design, which uses our White / Deep Red stationery. We added a bold red, black and white hibiscus border to the White A7 card. We typed the invitation text in red and black using the Jessie font from Fonts & Graphics 2. Paired with the Deep Red A7 envelope, it’s sure to get noticed! If you’re in the mood for a more refined evening, then our PrintingPress Extreme 4.0 design using our Café au Lait stationery is right for you. We added a custom border with the shape set to Line (Left) to the Ivory A7 card. We set the border’s fill width to 1.5 inches and filled the border with a blue and brown hibiscus pattern. We set the border’s margins to zero so the border runs all the way to the edge of the card. We adjusted the card’s margins so that they don’t overlap the border and added the invitation text in brown using the Noodles font from Fonts & Graphics 3 and the Benjamin Caps font from Fonts & Graphics for Weddings. Tuck the invite into the Chocolate A7 envelope lined in Blue and it’s ready to send.
Cut it out PrintingPress Extreme 4.0’s custom border feature gives you powerful design tools to design your own borders using any color, shape or pattern. For this month’s return address label project, we combined a custom border that uses the Bumps line type with a shape that has a dotted line border to create the look of a cutout border. We added a custom border with the shape set to Line (Left) and set the fill color to blue. We added an inner pen with the Bumps line type to add a scalloped edge to the blue line. Next we created a floating shape object with its fill color set to white and the Make White Transparent setting turned on to make the shape’s fill invisible. We added a white dotted outline to the shape and set the spacing to 7 to match the placement of the dots to the bumps in the border. (click to enlarge) Downloading projects All the projects in our newsletter are downloadable for use with our invitation software. The chart below shows which projects you can import, depending on which version of the software you own. For instructions on downloading projects from the newsletter, review the Tech Tip from the January 2005 issue of the Mountaincow Monthly. Borderless printing For the designs that bleed all the way to the edge of the card, we used our printer’s borderless printing feature. For more information on borderless printing, review the Tech Tip from the November 2004 issue of the Mountaincow Monthly. To use the borderless printing feature on a 3.5 x 4 inch place card, we set our printer’s paper size to 3.5 x 5 inches. Email links Please note that our email campaign provider, Campaigner, uses trackable links to the website address http://cmpgnr.com/. These links are safe to click and will redirect you to our website, however if you are ever concerned you can type www.mountaincow.com into your website browser and click on the Newsletter link at the top-right to read the current month’s issue.