Depending on your point of view, Serif's Home Creativity Suite is either a tired marketing ploy or a bit of a bargain. The company is well-known for products such as Pageplus, Photoplus and Drawplus, which provide easy-to-use graphics and DTP tools at a competitive price. A bundle that contains all three products for a mere £49.99 would therefore seem to be a real bargain. It's worth noting, though, that these aren't the latest versions of the products.

The Home Creativity Suite is quite a bit behind the times, as it includes the old Pageplus 8, Photoplus 7 and Drawplus 5. In other words, most of these programs are two major upgrades or nearly two years, behind the current versions.

Each program is provided on a separate disc, each with its own installer, rather than having a single integrated installer program for the entire suite and two of the three programs insist you enter your company name before you can install them. This is just plain sloppy in a product that's supposed to be aimed at home users.

Initial impressions aren't that good, then. But the Home Creativity Suite still manages to provide decent value for money. Its three component programs may not be bang up to date but they're still pretty good and, most importantly, easy to use.

Photoplus 7 obviously isn't as powerful as some of the newer photo-editing programs now available, but it's a decent entry-level editor and has some fun special effects you can play with. There are several tools such as 'twirl' and 'ripple' that you can use to distort images, and some powerful filters, including a lighting filter that allows you to add multiple light sources that can drastically alter the mood and look of a photo.

It's also got some useful animation features for creating graphics for web pages. But it does need a 'revert' tool that will allow you to instantly discard all changes you've made to an image and its File Browser has an annoying habit of staying on screen and obscuring any images you try to open, but these are only minor irritants. What it really lacks, though, are tightly focused options such as the 'recipes' in Photoshop Elements to guide you through specific tasks such as removing red-eye or adjusting image sizes.

Pageplus 8 is a good DTP program for first-time users. It has a wizard that allows you to automatically create a variety of documents such as newsletters, business cards and web pages. A 'Studio' pane on the right-hand side of the workspace then allows you to quickly modify options such as the colour scheme, or to add layout elements such as 'pull-out quotes' and text effects for logos. The program also has some good text tools, with simple options for creating drop capitals and handling vertical text. There's an option for creating text style sheets to ensure consistent appearance of text throughout your documents, although this can be clumsy at times and spreads options across too many dialogue boxes. Pageplus is a good program for creating documents that are just a few pages long, but we wouldn't recommend it for projects any longer than that.

Finally, there's Drawplus, the vector graphics and illustration part of the suite. This provides a good selection of tools for beginners, such as ready-made symbols for creating circuit diagrams, floorplans or computer network diagrams. It also has some more advanced functions, such as a powerful blending tool that can blend one shape into another.

But none of these programs are particularly outstanding, and there's a definite feeling that you're dealing with software that is well past its sell-by date. Even so, at just £49.99 the Home Creativity Suite is still good value for money and will appeal to complete beginners or people who are on a really tight budget.

Contact: Serif 0800 376 7070
www.serif.com

System requirements:

• Pentium PC with Windows 98 SE or later
• 64MB of Ram