April 2004

SMALL-SCALE DESIGN SOFTWARE

By: Niko Coucouvanis

Do-it-yourself business cards: a great idea that can go horribly wrong. Business Card Composer offers you a little help by providing decently designed templates what you can customized with your own personal information. The more ambitions, artsy-cardsy types can either tweak any design element of a provided template or start from scratch using backgrounds and clip art from the app's libraries.

Business Card Assistant organized its started templates into eight categories (such as Business, Macintosh, and Photo Designs), which of 10 to 24 variations on the theme. Once you settle on a design, click the Next button, and Composer will automatically enter your personal info from Address Book. From there, choose from a long list of print layouts, which includes a one-up option for sending to a print shop, plus templates for printing up 10 cards on a sheet.

Once you get to the composition window, you can reposition, add, or delete text fields on the card and dig into Composer's typographic adjusters to tweak the font style, size, kerning, baseline, and stacking order (stacking order also works on selected graphics). A handy Font window gives you access to formatting options such as font style, size, underlining, and drop shadows. Missing a graphical tools for doing free-form design on the card canvas, but you can import your own graphic files. Most of provided graphics have transparent backgrounds, but some backgrounds are white, limiting usability.

Business Card Composer is a fast, easy way for you to look like you know what you're doing - both when you're designing the card and when you're handing out the final product.

GOOD NEWS: Decent designs and graphics. Very easy to use. BAD NEWS: No G5 or Panther clip art. White background limits usability.