January, 2007
By: Sheala B.
Ok, I admit it. I'm an Adobe girl. When it comes to graphics and illustration, I turn
to programs I know, because it's quick and easy. Learning a new graphics program is like crossing the
hot sandy beach to get to the ocean. It's painful, sometimes long, but if you want to get there...
So imagine my surprise when I started checking out Art Text from BeLight software. I'm
not always a fan of the smaller art programs, since I usually find them lacking in power or plug-in
wannabes. Art Text might change my mind.
Features:
- More than 50 pre-designed styles included.
- Shading Pro Tool (shade anything!)
- Combine Text with a background image.
- Bend text using 20 adjustable vector transformation shapes or Bezier splines.
- Export into several popular formats.
First Impressions:
The first thing I noticed, was it's clean, simple intuitive interface. Let's see, type text here, make
adjustments here. Except it's more than that. You can edit your text; I don't mean just change the letters,
but also the kerning and spacing and all those good text layout tweaks.
Then there's the Art part of this program. You can do all those cool Photoshop-like text
effects. Add texture, gradients, backgrounds, shadows, glows; all of these things can be added and adjusts
to and around the text. You can import your files and turn it into instant logo. It will take your complex
file, make it an outline and then let it edit with the cool little tools previously mentioned.
 
It taps into some of Mac OS X's features, using the Font Manager to browse your font
choices. It also gives you the variety of color sets OS X lets you choose from. Even the crayons!
Now if you're thinking, 'that's great, but I'm no good at designing from scratch', you're
in luck. Art Text has about a zillion pre-built styles, that can be adjusted. It also has a cool set of
pre-designed glyphs and symbols, that can also be edited. Oh and if you design a style from scratch you like,
you can save it.
 
Hey did I mention that I'm a fan of the 'live edit', now that Adobe has spoiled me to it?
Well Art Text has that going for it. Move the dot in the angle circle and you get to see it change on your
text. The changes you make show up as fast as your computer can render it. On my iBook G4, I didn't find
myself tapping my fingers waiting.
Annoyances:
Now let's talk about the few annoyances I found using Art Text. You only get a choice between shadow or
glow. Sometimes if I'm feeling elaborate, I might like to do both. Neon might be easier to do with both.
But Neon might be a little too 90's for today. The next little bug, is that if you have a glyph on your
board and then select a pre-made style, you glyph goes away, until you flip your text palette back over.
At first I thought I'd done something wrong, until I realized it was a bug.
The last thing I'll talk about may or may not be considered a problem. There are two options
when you've finished building your Art Text.
- You can copy to the Clipboard. Kudos to whoever thought of building a button for that. Sometimes I
forget how easy it is to the OS X Clipboard. Apple has made it that way and I usually spend a few minutes
playing with formats and exports and imports before I copy to the Clipboard.
- The second option Art Text gives you when you're down with your work is Export. This is my final
complaint, the Export options are scant. It has the basic you need to bring your Art Text to probably any
other program, but I might have been wishing hard for Vector options. Still in other programs, when you
get to these type of effects you've gone beyond Vector anyway. Still, I was delighted to see when I copied
my art to Photoshop, it showed up as a 'Smart Object', in Adobe world that's supposed to be really good.
Conclusion: I recommend this program for anyone with Artistic Text needs,
especially if you don't want to mess around with any of the heavy hitting graphics programs. For $29.95(us)
you can make some cool titles and logos for your newsletters and web pages, painlessly.
So my final verdict on BeLight's Art Text: Fun: 5/5, Easy Learning: 5/5, Usefulness: 4.5/5.
Reviewed By: Sheala B.
thinkmac.net rating - 4.5 out of 5
Company: BeLight Software Product:
Art Text Price: 29.95 USD (academic pricing available).
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