Smart Art degrades

I was attempting to make a banner for this blog.  I don’t have enormous amounts of time, so I thought I’d utilize MS Word 2007’s smart art to create one.  If you haven’t worked with the smart art tool inside of the latest MS Word I’d recommend checking it out, as it’s quite powerful.  However it does have a problem for porting your professional looking creations outside of the Word document itself. 

When you copy the Smart Art it ends up as an image.  I pasted this image into Paint.NET (another great and Free! tool) that I use for manipulating images at work since Photoshop is too pricey for manipulating web page screen shots (another story). 

The image that ends up getting pasted is a fuzzy representation of it’s former crisp self.   

It doesn’t look completely aweful, but depending on your monitor it may look pretty blurry.  I wasn’t happy with the result so I decided to just use a personal picture. The personal picture turned out looking better than the graphic I was wanting to banner the top with.  There is something to be said for keeping it simple.