Posted on Friday, June 06 @ 00:41:52 EDT by Chad Levin

With today’s ink jet printers having resolutions and print speeds that are comparable to laser printers the need to take your printing jobs to a professional printing press such as Kinko’s is becoming less important. Because of the enhancements in ink-jet technology it is now more cost-effective to print office essentials such as business cards and letterheads yourself as long as you have the right software for the job. Earlier last week a program that makes business card creation easy as pie was released for the Macintosh.

The program that simplifies business card production on your home system is developed by BeLight Software and is called Business Card Composer. The program screams Macintosh and uses a one-window interface that is similar to Apple’s own Keynote presentation program. Business Card Composer features pre-made design templates that you can choose to work with and preset cards that fit a wide variety of categories. The program also includes blank templates for most business card paper sold at office supply stores so one can make their own cards from scratch without worrying about misprints. BCC has tools to draw shapes, lines, and other objects, and includes a fairly comprehensive clip-art collection that the artistically challenged can use. Other features of the program include the ability to import a variety of images into a card design so even if your company logo is in an uncommon graphic format BCC should be able to handle the image.

The actual card printing process in Business Card Composer is very streamlined once you get the hang off it. To print you need to choose the template that you are printing on. The developer of BCC makes it easy to choice the correct template by including product numbers for most paper types so all the user needs to do is match the numbers up. Once the template is selected hit print and choose the number of copies that you want. If you are printing one hundred cards enter the number one hundred for the number of copies. This will print ten cards on ten sheets of paper. Entering ten copies will only give you ten individual cards.

Business Card Composer sells for $39.95. A demo program of the version can be downloaded at http://www.belightsoft.com/. An excellent paper to use when printing your business card is made from Avery and is model #8371. The cards have clean edges so when you punch the business cards out of their paper frame you’ll have no perforations. The lack of perforations further enhances the professional look of homemade business cards. Avery sells these business cards at most office supply stores. A pack of two hundred cards sells for around $12.

The M.O.S.P. Perspectives:

If you have a modern ink-jet printer and are looking to create your own business cards BCC is an excellent program. The program is easier to use than the business cards templates in word processing suites such as Microsoft Word, and it gives you more creative controls, and being creative is what the Macintosh platform is all about.