Business Card Composer 2.1 Application of the month

May 2004

HOW MANY TIMES have you been chatting about a hobby or special skill and said "let me give my card" only to confess you were joking? Well, the joke would be much better if you actually had a card, and you hobby or skill would certainly be more marketable. Ukrainian Mac fans BeLight Software have your self-promotion in mind with Business Card Composer 2.1 ($40, www.belightsoft.com) for OS 10.2 or higher, a DIY business card layout program with plenty of templates, fonts, clip art and images to make card creation simple for designers and non-designers alike. You can export cards as a TIFF or PDF, or opt to send the card to BeLight's online print service and order 100 to 5,000 cards, so you'll have plenty to hand out for the prefect punch line.

1 When you first launch Business Card Composer (BCC), the Business Card Assistant (not pictured) opens to let you choose a template to work on from more than 130 designs divided into eight categories, including Business, Photo Designs and Square Designs. Templates are mostly horizontal, but with a healthy dose of vertical layouts, too. In step 2 of the Assistant, you enter the name, company and contact information you want to card, or choose a name from Apple's Address Book to automatically enter the info. Finally, you select a layout in the Assistant to help you print the card later. There are hundreds of layouts, including some for CD-R stickers, folded business cards and special paper from companies such Avery (www.avery.com)

Templates can virtually do all the work for you, but it's so easy to manipulate them into your own design, you may change everything about them, as you did in our example here. Only position of the address and phone number text stayed the same. We quickly decided to scrap the background from the template in favor of a sold color background, which we chose from the Colors window. We then changed the original font to two of the many included fonts, and moved the text boxes with the Selection tool. BCC shows rulers and snaps to them to align one element with another on the card. We also added a box and two lines with the Panel and Separator tools and colored them with a tint related to the background. Finally, we chose a background from the included images to add some texture and reduced its opacity to aid visibility.

2 BCC's top toolbar gives you shortcuts for many menu commands and lets you select the four main tools. These include the Selection tool, foe selecting text and other elements for editing or moving them around the card. Use the Text tool to create text boxes. Use the Panel tool to create box elements with outlines of variable thickness and color and that can be filled with any color. Use the Separator tool to create lines of variable thickness and color. Also on the toolbar is a Print button, Zoom In/Out buttons and shortcuts for the Properties, Colors and Font windows. The Change Person button opens a menu of Address Book contacts so you can instantly change the contact info of the card. There's also an Insert Picture button that lets you import an image from anywhere on you hard drive.

3 The left side of the main window shows either the included clip art or in this case, the included background images. Clicking on a clip art or background image will insert it into the card layout and activate it in the Properties window for editing. There are hundreds of searchable clip art images broken into 20 categories, such as animals, buildings, nature, office and sports. The Background panel includes a very cool Generate button, which creates random backgrounds out of multi-colored layered shapes. Though hit-or-miss, this feature is worth trying for the occasionally groovy results.

4 The Properties window lets you edit the selected element on your card, whether it's a line, box, text or image. In our example, the background image is selected, and you can see that we greatly reduced the opacity. The other options are to rotate and flip the image, tint the image using any color or apply more than 50 masks to the image. When a box or line is selected, you can change the thickness, color and opacity in the Properties. For text, you can add a shadow to the text, a background label to a text box or a label in front of the text box such as "Web:" or "Email:" if appropriate. You can also change the text's color and alignment.

5 In the Colors window, there are five methods for choosing the prefect color for text, lines, fills, etc.: the Color Wheel (shown here), Color Slider, Color Palettes, Image Palettes and Crayons, all of which include an opacity slider. A nice feature is the receptacle at the bottom of the Colors window foe saving up to 15 colors that you create foe later use.

6 The Font window shows you all the available font families, some of which will have typeface options, such as bold, italic or bold italic. A search box lets you enter names of fonts to find them quicker. You can enter a point size for the font from 8 to 72. Also, each text box can be underlined or crossed through within the Text window. Fonts are broken down into collections such as Classic, Fun and Modern. We really liked that we could save the fonts we liked best in the Favorites Collection, so we didn't have to root around for them the next time we wanted them.