Designing and making graphics, buttons, headers, and other kinds of images is something I love, love, love to do. It’s just a niche for me, an outlet of creativity. When I heard we were going to review Graphics Toolbox for the Crew, I was pretty excited at first. Graphics Toolbox was created by Linda Holler and William Tsao. Linda worked for more than 25 years in New York’s fashion industry and used the Colour Matters program for much of her work. She wanted to create something affordable for families to use, so that they could make their own creations, greatly benefiting them in the long run.
Graphics Toolbox has many features:
- Life Color cards and an extensive color library- It comes with RGB glide and a color finder. You can actually match your colors to make sure that they will go together well in your image.
- Color Tools
- Basic Drawing Tools
- Framing Tools
- Basic Image Manipulation Tools
- Advanced Graphic Tools
- Embellishing Images
…and more. There is also a user manual that you can download and use for reference. To help you learn Graphics Toolbox, there are tutorial videos that you can watch. These tutorials will help walk you through the functions of Graphics Toolbox, as well as making a project of your own.  They also have one-on-one training, which, in my opinion, is steep at $65/hour.
Honestly, I am a Photoshop girl….for some reason, with the Graphics Toolbox, it was really hard for me to “get it.” I felt that the images I could make with it were not very professional looking; I just wasn’t impressed. I had a hard time learning how to use it too. For me, videos just aren’t a great way to learn; I have to actually do it myself to learn, usually with several books laid out on my desk as I go. To me, this was very difficult to learn how to use; my husband and I both sat here confused at times, and we both create things all the time….but this truly had us stumped. It just isn’t as user-friendly, in my opinion, and with busy lives, it’s hard for us to fully learn something as time-consuming as this was. I can’t tell you how many times we had to completely X out of the program and start over because we would make a mistake and couldn’t take it out. Here is one image that we were able to make.
For some families, this program may be a wonderful tool, but for our family, it just wasn’t a great fit. I am grateful for the opportunity to review it, though.
Graphics Toolbox works with operating systems Windows NT, 2000, XP, or Vista. You can purchase it for one user for $149. You can also try it free for 30 days. You can read more reviews on the TOS Homeschool Crew blog.
(Disclosure: We were provided this program, free of charge, by Linda Holler of Graphics Toolbox, in association with the TOS Homeschool Crew.)
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