Business Card Composer

A cool tool for creating business cards

By: Robert Pritchett

$40 USD
Mac OS X 10.2 or later, 6.2 MB hard drive space.
Targeted to the Small Office, Home Office environment

Strengths: From novice business card designer to "expert" in 20 minutes or less. A quick learn-by-doing 1-2-3 discovery process. Uses OS X (Cocoa) technology nicely.
Weaknesses: The program takes a little while to "warm up" and get going, but not too long. Must be all the graphics decompressing or the Apple OS X technology it uses. And my machine.

Business Card Composer™ by BeLight Software, Ltd. is a darned good business card creator if you want to make cards in small batches and don't mind the faux pauxes of the pre-positioned titling text (according to The Non-Designer's Design Book„) for doing business cards, stationary and envelopes. Easily edited. Did you notice they named it "Composer" and not "Builder"?

Does your contact information seem to change on a regular basis or do you work for more than one company at a time? Try this program and leave a lasting impression, for at least for a little while anyway.

There are basically 3 quick steps to take in using this program, Choose something, Customize it, then Print. That's really it.

I have quite a collection of other's business cards and it keeps growing. I have examples of some real badly created cards and some other real "keepers" because of styling, layout, and great design I've gathered over the years. I have organized them in a "random access memory" box based on an alpha-industrial semi-organized manner. One thing I've noticed is that they do have a shelf-life and don't appear to be much good after 5 years. We all tend to move about and switch jobs more often than we used to.

So I find it a real boon to have an application designed for OS X that works as well as Business Card Composer.

Below is a sample composite picture of the tools and layout that eventually appears when

Business Card Composer is opened. There are over 500 pictures to play, err, work with and there are property toolkits for masking and tinting. There is also a direct link to the OS X fonts list and there is plenty to play with.

Here is a sample of the Business Card Assistant that can be used in the planning process with some baseline cards that come with the program. It is a thoughtful place to begin.

Next is a rendition of a card I really enjoyed created using this program. I began with some ideas: How can I best reflect the image I want to let macCompanion portray? A World View? A nice place to start. A Universal View? A nice place to seek towards. Feet firmly planted on the ground but always looking up? Nice perspective. Oh, and what is that floating through the ether? Why macCompanion of course!

In western civilization for the most part, we tend to read top-down, left to right. So I made a card that seems to float left to right and from darkness towards the light.
I was able to include Photoshop™ graphics (I eventually used) as well as AppleWorks™ (I later tossed) text and drawings.

I added the masthead from macCompanion, then used the masking image to let the background semi-appear through the text. I grabbed one of the world symbols from the program and then used another image mask around it. I used a universe image and rotated it to put darkness towards the left and brightness towards the right, then used another image mask to lighten the area behind the text and give the impression of light reflecting off the earth. I then changed the colorization of the text in an attempt to create contrast against the background and made the background for each piece of text "white" (clear). I think the results are spectacular!

The contact content and message are there, and without Business Card Composer this effort would have taken a lot longer. Since we are not currently a large firm, small batches of cards at a time works well, instead of having to make extra trips to some professional printer. The results are spectacular!

Print is done through a print preferences list that has just about every known standard known to man for printing cards around the world. The print default for me was 10 cards per page (3.5" x 2" per card). I could print out a test card all by itself and it would have the cut lines similar to the 8 or 10-card per sheet layout.

I can also export the card to PDF for printing professionally if I choose. However, I noticed some artifacts in one of the images, so I used the Apple-Shift-4 method of extracting the finished product so you could see what I created. The finished PDFs or TIFFs also oversize (1mm) the cards and cut-lines for a printing-house.

I noticed I cannot really add artwork from within the program, but I can drag & drop into it. Clipart can also be created from fonts and symbols. It seems just about everything can be reversed or flipped, rotated or resized, colorized, and shadowed. And I can use my OS X Address Book to create other team-member cards from their stored information if I wish. At least the information transfers. Be careful with the designation stuff. If each text field is somehow "Name", it won't transfer nicely. Use the drop-down menu for each field as intended and it works correctly.

I found the effects to be both quick and clean. So, is $40 too much to "get in, get it done and then get out" for doing business cards? Making a card shouldn't really require a few day's effort and patience just to make a quick but lasting impression. As it was, what took me the longest was in getting the background in the masthead to fade away. Thankfully, it didn't take too long to figure out.

What's missing? A detailed, written "how-to" guide. The creators of this program believe sincerely in the "picture is worth a thousand words" process and so they have devised a "look at this example" approach to learning the program. And maybe some future effort will be put into double-sided and tri-fold card "how-tos". Remember, cards are two-dimensional – and can be more.

I've used other programs before, but this one is a joy to learn to use and apparently uses the discovery method (seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you) of quickly coming up to speed in using this wonderful program. I liked it so much I asked to be an affiliate!