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October, 2005
 By: Chris Lawson
Developer: BeLight Software
Price: $35 (download); $40 (boxed); $20 (upgrade)
Requirements: Mac OS X 10.2
Trial: Nagware (puts “Made with Business Card Composer” on everything)
Thanks to the rock-bottom prices on laser and photo-quality
inkjet printers, more people than ever have the ability to do professional-grade
print jobs at home. A lot of employers provide business cards for their
employees, but if you’re self-employed or prefer to do your own design,
Business Card Composer (BCC) offers an economical alternative to high-priced
(and over-powered, for this job) desktop publishing software.
The old cliché says that a jack of all trades is a
master of none, and for making business cards, it pretty much holds true of
most desktop publishing software. BeLight’s approach with BCC is
refreshingly simple: make an application that does only one thing and does
it extremely well.
When you first launch the application, you’re presented
with the Business Card Assistant, a brilliant walk-through wizard. You can
choose to build a card based on one of the several hundred included designs,
or you can start with a blank slate and create your own. The included designs
are, for the most part, very tasteful and professional, a definite cut above
typical templates included with many applications.
Once you’ve chosen a design, the next step is to fill
in the contact information. BCC thoughtfully reads the Address Book entry
you’ve designated as your own and fills in as much as it can from
that database. You can make business cards for other people, too—just
drop the Address Book entry onto the text fields from the list on the right.
After filling in the data, you can choose a printing layout
for the cards. BCC comes with print templates for nearly every card layout
known to man, along with custom templates and online print templates for
sending to a print shop.
Now you’re ready to put the finishing touches on the
card. After completing the three-step assistant, BCC presents a fairly
standard page-layout window where you can select various elements, rearrange
them, group them, resize them, change their color and opacity, etc.—in
short, everything you’d expect a professional desktop publishing
program to do.
If you choose to skip the Assistant, you’ll be sent
straight to the layout window, complete with a blank layout, where you can
design your own card from the ground up.
Various clip art collections are available via the pop-up menu
on the left, or you can use photos in your iPhoto database, or choose another
folder of clip art or photos. BCC’s downloadable version ships with a
small clip art library (700 images); the boxed version, which is a great deal
at $5 more, ships with an enormous library of over 23,000 images. The boxed
version also provides another 100 pre-made business card templates for a total
of 500 designs.
Business Card Composer’s OS X integration is excellent.
Not only does it utilize the Address Book and iPhoto databases, but Tiger users
can apply Core Image filters to clip art and photos. This has the potential to
save you the time and trouble of switching to an application like Photoshop or
iPhoto—you can do all your FX work in BCC itself. And of course, as with
any good OS X application, Business Card Composer has excellent Help.
Unlike most professional page-layout apps, BCC lacks rulers and
guides, probably its most serious omission. The ability to snap elements to a
grid would be most useful as well. BCC has limited snap-to functionality, much
like that found in Interface Builder, but Interface Builder provides guides,
which BCC does not. Pixel-level layout and control are made considerably more
difficult due to this omission, and it’s the only thing keeping BCC from
getting an Excellent rating.
The only other major quirk of the software is in the
aforementioned Help. While excellent in general, BeLight’s developers
are Ukrainian (a lovely postcard of Odessa was included in the press kit), and
there are times it’s obvious English is not their first language.
It’s not bad enough to inhibit comprehension, but the Help could use
a good native English copyediting.
The functionality offered by Business Card Composer is either
partially or completely duplicated in Adobe’s InDesign; Quark’s
XPress; Apple’s AppleWorks, Pages, and FileMaker; and Omni’s
OmniGraffle, so if you already have one of these apps, you might find BCC to
be superfluous. However, with the exception of the two high-end DTP apps, none
of these performs as well as BCC in the business card task. A jack of all trades
might be nice, but for most people, a master of one is more useful.
Copyright © 2005 Chris Lawson. Reviewing in ATPM is open to anyone.
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