What Happened to Tin Lizzie Software and Their "Out of Business" Templates
I ran into this question a few times over the years when people were trying to track down old business card templates and software they used back in the late 1990s. Tin Lizzie was a company that made desktop publishing tools, primarily around business cards, stationery, and flyers. Their software was decent for what it was — straightforward drag-and-drop interface, worked on Windows 95/98 machines, had a solid template library for small business owners who didn't want to pay a designer. The "Out of Business" thing was a template pack they offered, basically pre-designed signs, flyers, and letters you could use if your business was closing down. Closure notices, "We're Moving" signs, liquidation sale flyers. Practical stuff. Here's the thing nobody wants to hear: Tin Lizzie as a company is gone. The original domain is dead, their support servers have been offline for well over a decade, and there's no official download source for their software or template packs anymore. If you're looking for the original Tin Lizzie "Out of Business" template files, they aren't available through any legitimate channel. I know because I spent a few evenings about five years ago trying to find working mirrors for people on a forum who needed something similar for a friend's closing restaurant. Most links pointed to dead URLs or sketchy file-hosting sites. The workaround I ended up using was to grab the closest equivalent template from free resources and adapt it. The original Tin Lizzie templates used a very standard layout — bold headline text, contact information block, a disclaimer line at the bottom. You can replicate this in any modern word processor or free design tool like Canva or even LibreOffice. If you need something that looks like the original Tin Lizzie closure notice, here's what I'd recommend instead of hunting for dead files: open a blank document, set the page size to 8.5 by 11, use a bold sans-serif font like Arial Black or Helvetica Bold for the headline "OUT OF BUSINESS" or "BUSINESS CLOSED," put your company name and last known address below it in regular weight, add a date line, and that's it. The original templates weren't complex. The value was in the formatting choices, not any proprietary magic.
I did manage to recover a few Tin Lizzie template files from an archived PDF of their old catalog that someone had scanned and uploaded to a web archive. The Wayback Machine has a snapshot or two of their old website from around 2001-2003. It's not the software itself, but you can see the exact layouts they offered. That's probably the closest you'll get to seeing what the original "Out of Business" pack looked like without risking malware from random download sites. If you're trying to use actual Tin Lizzie software on a modern system, you'll run into compatibility issues pretty quickly. The software was built for 32-bit Windows and doesn't run cleanly on Windows 10 or 11 without some effort. I had to use a virtual machine running Windows XP just to get it to launch properly. The printer drivers it relied on are also obsolete, so even if you get the software running, output quality suffers. Modern printers use different color profiles and resolution handling that the old Tin Lizzie engine doesn't account for. Your output might come out slightly off-color or at a lower effective DPI than you'd expect. For anyone who actually needs a professional closure notice today, I'd suggest skipping the nostalgic route entirely. Use a current design tool. The Tin Lizzie templates had a specific aesthetic that reads very early-2000s, and that might undermine the seriousness of a business closure depending on your audience. A clean, modern layout will look more credible. But if you're set on the retro look for some reason, the Wayback Machine is your best starting point, and recreating the templates from scratch is genuinely faster than troubleshooting the old software.
The one useful bit of technical detail I can share from dealing with this: if you do find a copy of the Tin Lizzie software somewhere and try to run it in a VM, make sure to install the latest service pack for your virtual Windows version before launching the installer. The Tin Lizzie installers tend to fail silently on unpatched systems, and you'll spend an hour wondering why nothing happened before realizing the OS is missing basic runtime components. That one cost me a Saturday afternoon. I don't have a download link to offer because there isn't a safe, legal one. Anything claiming to be a "Tin Lizzie Out of Business template download" on random file-sharing sites is either bundled with unwanted software or just not the real thing. The templates were simple enough that rebuilding them takes about ten minutes in any modern tool, and you end up with a file that actually prints correctly on your hardware.
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