Business Card Composer! Reviewed by Snaggy

Available as a download, or a boxed product.

I recently had the opportunity of taking BeLight Software's Business Card Composer for a test drive. Now, when I first heard of Business Card Composer, I thought to myself, "Hmmm, making business cards is no big deal, right? Why would anyone need an app to do it?" Well, first thoughts can definitely be wrong, and it only took a few moments after launching it to realized how incredibly handy this application is.

BCC is a beautifully designed program. You can tell that BeLight's programers love OS X and want to show off its power. But besides having a pretty face, this app has a lot of muscle. It lets anyone create professional looking business cards with ease, even if you're artistically challenged. This product makes designing cards so easy and fast, it would be crazy not to use it.

Where Business Card Composer is your best friend:

• At trade shows or events where you need to update (adding your booth number or special promotions).
• When your phone or e-mail has changed, and you can't wait until your company makes new cards for you.
• When you need to create a small run of cards for temporary staff.
• When you have several jobs and want to have a separate card for each.
• When you want to create a sharp looking card with your phone and e-mail to give to the people you meet.

BCC's Workspace:

You can choose from among over 23,000 high-quality images (700 in the downloadable version) and nearly 500 professional designs to quickly whip up a great-looking card, or you can import your own graphics and photos. The app features nice integration with Google images and iPhoto. You can search the Internet from within the application, or select images from your iPhoto library or any folder on your computer. You can even use the "Generate Image" command to create funky abstract backgrounds.

Using BCC, it's easy to start your own business!

Of course BCC's editing tools are not as sophisticated as dedicated graphic apps like Photoshop, but they are more than sufficient for most tasks and their simplicity lets you create your own designs quickly. You can control transparency, apply masks and fills, tile and crop images. The smart guides are a really nice feature, helping you line up card elements very easily. You can also switch between Background and Foreground modes for more complicated designs, layering your compositions.

Want to hack the templates? No problem. It's easy to use BCC for more than just business cards, simply change the layout size and you can easily make personalized greeting cards, badges, CD inserts, ... just about anything you can print out.

More fancy stuff:

• Integration with Apple Address Book - drag and drop contacts right onto your cards.
• Order your cards to be printed and mailed to you from an online print shop.
• Counter feature allows you to numerate cards and assign each card a unique number, handy if you're designing membership cards.
• Print multiple card designs on one sheet... sweet!

To get an idea of all the kind of things you can do with Business Card Composer... check out BeLight's sample pages.

How to get it:
Business Card Composer ships in two manifestations, a boxed version, which is a complete kit to create and print business cards, calling cards, and badges, with high-quality card stock for 100 business cards, over 23,000 images and 500 designs. The download edition comes with fewer clipart (700) and designs (400), and contains no card stock.

Product Details
Boxed edition: $39.95+shipping
Download edition: $34.95
Upgrade to boxed edition: $19.95+shipping.

Available at BeLight and on Amazon.

System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.2 or later. Freshly update for Tiger, here.

Heh, I couldn't resist...