From Jacci Howard Bear,
Your Guide to Desktop Publishing.
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Aug 22 2007

Invite friends and neighbors to your pumpkin patch with cards and invitations featuring a a scary or fun pumpkin face, ghosts, goblins, or ghouls. Print your own Halloween party decorations, get templates to carve a pumpkin. Download free templates for spooky t-shirt transfers, trick or treat bags, costumes and other Halloween craft projects.

Design Tip: Don't clutter your cards with too many cute graphics. Repeat one good image several times to add impact rather than throwing in every witch, pumpkin, bat, or ghost that you find. When using different images, keep the style similar — woodcut, modern, sketched, etc.

• Print these Halloween cards on your color printer directly from the Adobe Acrobat PDF files you download from Hewlett-Packard. There are ghosts, bats, monsters, and more spooky themes. They also have a Halloween Photo Card project.

• If you have Ulead Photo Express 4.0, Platinum 2000, 3.0 or 2.0, download one of their free Halloween Card Templates.

• HP also has a few Halloween invitation projects featuring ghosts, witches, and a skeleton.

Invitation/Card Idea: Turn a map of your neighborhood into a Halloween maze — where the only correct solution leads right to your haunted house.

• Go beyond cards and decorations - use your computer and printer to help you carve a pumpkin. HP has pumpkin carving templates in PDF format. Swan Pumpkin Farm has carving tips as well as printable templates for your Jack-o-Lantern face as well as pumpkin carving tips. And About New England for Visitors Guide Kim Knox has rounded up even more pumpkin carving template resources.

• All these free HP Halloween craft project templates are in PDF format. Download and print.
  • Doorbell Decorations to transform your doorbell into a ghost or black cat or other Halloween character.
    
    
  • Day of the Dead party kit for the day after Halloween has invitations and decorations.

Invitation/Card Idea: Don't fret over finding the right clip art. Use pre-designed holiday papers. Want to make your party a bit more dignified than the usual Halloween bash? Use color paper in warm fall colors and pick a not too outrageous typeface. Put your time and effort into writing a nice invite and having a fun party. Or, try this Fall Harvest Stationary template from HP.

Get free Halloween Pictures and Fonts to make your own custom Halloween project.

Design Tip: Many of the Halloween fonts that are so fun to use are also difficult to read. Choose and use these decorative fonts carefully. Use them at large sizes for short headlines and easy to recognize words (Boo! Happy Halloween). Choose a nice, easy to read serif or sans serif font for body copy — and especially for important information like dates, times, and locations for your Halloween festivities.