By Fabian W.
Editor-in-Chief
06/28/03

With MacWorld CreativePRO expo coming up I have been on the lookout for an easy way to create new business cards that I could take along with me on the trip. The Business Card Composer seems to be this software. It lets anyone create professional looking business cards with ease, even if you're a little creatively challenged.

Installation:
Installing the software is simply a matter of downloading the .dmg file, expanding it, and dragging the resulting application to your "Application Folder" (or any other folder that is). Simple enough.

Usage:
When you first launch the application it greets you with the wizard like "Business Card Assistant". Several basic categories of business card designs are available. These include Attractive, Business, Lines, Macintosh (yes, there's such a category.), Photo Designs, Plain Text, Square Designs, and Unique. Under each of these categories you get to select from 8 to 15 different designs. I, for one, like the Newton Dream design under the Macintosh category. After selecting the design, and hitting the next button, the application moves on to an information screen. Here the composer searches your address book and automatically fills all your information (or for that matter any one else's information contained in the address book) into the matching fields.

After hitting the next button the program asks you to select your type of paper. Selections range from your own paper, to folding cards, to over 180 pre-made paper formats from ten different companies. Strange formats are such as business card CD's are included as well. The different paper types are sorted by company and each have an ID number that should match up to the number on the packet you buy. It shouldn't be too hard to find a paper on the market that will work for you, every business card paper I have found so far was compatible with this application.

After entering your information the application automatically assembles the design and text into a complete business card. It couldn't be easier. The card will appear in the application and from here you can edit the card as much as required. This includes changing colors, substituting clip-art, and changing text. What is left to do now is to calibrate your printer and print your cards. We will talk more about that later on.

If you want to go the more creative route instead of using the wizard, select the "New Blank" button on the first page of the assistant to start from scratch. Now to be sure to select your paper type first before continuing by going to the "Card Properties..." menu. This will ensure that you won't have to fix your design later to make it work with your printer paper. After doing this the application opens a blank screen in grey, and outlines a business card in white. Here you can start designing your card by selecting from over 500 clip art images and backgrounds to use on your card. (This is according to the developers, I didn't count them all.) In addition the application provides masks for each image, and allows the user to tint, rotate, flip, and change the opacity of images.

The application also provides a line drawing tool, and a box drawing tool. This might not seem too much, but keep in mind that you can always import images created in other applications. Nevertheless, I would have liked the ability to add masks to the boxes, a feature that is currently only available for images.

In addition BeLight software found a great way of adding text to your business cards. Everything from name, company, title, telephone number, to e-mail can easily be placed on your card with help of the address book and automated menus. If AutoFill is turned on under the preferences, all you need to do is click, select the type of text to place, and the address book does the rest. The Composer also allows you to change information in the text fields to those of someone else by simply selecting a different person from your address book. All text can be aligned to the left, center or right inside it's own space. Additionally the text background can be changed, and a drop shadow can be added.

The Business Card Composer also auto-aligns, or "Snaps" objects into place on business cards to keep each object lined up with the others. This can be a pain sometimes when your are trying to move an object just a couple of pixels to a certain direction, but luckily it can be turned off under the preferences when needed. (It would have been even better if this function could be turned on and off by hitting a keyboard combo.)

The tools available really provide a wide array of possibilities while still making the process of creating business cards easy. In other words the composer isn't of "Photoshop" caliber, but instead provides simple tools that allow you to create great looking business cards easily and fast. And that's exactly what's it's supposed to do.

On to printing. Before printing the cards it is necessary to calibrate your printer. A printer is calibrated by printing out a calibration sheet, folding it, and entering how much deviation results in the applications window. (It makes sense when you do it, trust me.) After calibrating the printer you are ready to print your cards. Double check if you have the right type of card selected under card properties, and hit print.

The print menu allows you to change several options before printing. This includes the order in which cards are printed on a page, which is selectable under the "Layout" section. The Business Card Composer section allows you to select the card you would like to start printing from, and also lets you add dotted or cut lines to your print outs if you are using your own paper. Additionally you have the option of outputting your cards in PDF format. Also note that Under the "Copies and Print" menu the "Copies" section refers to how many business cards will be printed on a single sheet, not how many pages are printed.

After printing our first page the cards looked great, but were not perfectly placed vertically. Each card was moved up slightly. Additionally our printer cut off a few millimeters of our bottom two cards. The first problem can be fixed by adjusting the calibration of the printer, the second one seemed to be a border problem which should be able to be fixed under the page set up menu. I tried adjusting the bottom border, but by press time our printer was still cutting off a small part of the card. My suggestion is to print your business cards on a blank sheet of paper before using the more expensive pre-made business card paper to test how it will line up. Even though normal letter paper is often smaller than the actual business card paper, you can still test how your cards match up by by aligning the top edges and holding it against a light source.

Problems:
The applications crashed a couple of times. Once during the designing of the cards and another time while I was calibrating our printer over a network. Otherwise I can't really complain. The printing process wasn't problem free when we tried it, but with some work printing cards that fit should not be a problem.

Conclusion:
The Business Card Composer is a great application that makes it simple to create elegant business cards. The design tools that are included are great and work very effectively.