Hands-On Review--BusinessCard Composer

Everybody needs business cards. Even those who do not own a business can use their own personal cards to present themselves and to leave contact information with someone or some business. BusinessCard Composer from BeLight Software, Ltd. makes it simple for anyone with a Mac running Mac OS X 10.2 and higher and a printer to print their own "professionally-done" business or personal cards. The BeLight Software web site even has an interesting history of business cards.

BusinessCard Composer (BCC) runs natively in Mac OS X's cocoa layer to take advantage of X's Quartz graphics engine. It is a simple but powerful end-to-end application, handling the job from design to creation to printing. BCC is designed to be easy to use for the specific purpose of making personal or personal cards. But it also has simple to use graphics tools for opacity, color gradient fills, masks and more that make it a very powerful application as well.

BCC has over 100 standard designs to choose from using the 1-2-3 assistant and over 500 images to easily customize the standard designs. The standard designs are fully editable but one can still design one's own card from scratch. Data from your Address Book can be used to automatically fill out card design.

Virtually any image, including PDF, can be imported to use on one's card. The are 50 or so masks that can be used with the images. There's a snap tool and a positioning indicator for aligning objects and floating palettes for tools, fonts and colors.

Printing your cards is also made simple. BCC has a calibration procedure to use any paper stock that your printer can use. The user can define the layout and select any card on the page to print. Crop and registration marks allow for easy cutting of the page into indiviual cards.

So how well does BusinessCard Composer really work? Fortunately, there is nothing but good news--we tested v1.1. We launched the application and were greeted with the Business Card Assistant window shown at right. The first step of three is open showing the eight categories of designs. Each category, lower left pane, has some 15-20 designs for a total of over 100. We spent some time checking out all 100+ and chose Business/Aqua (shown above in the large right pane). The four buttons at the bottom of the window open an existing project, open a blank page instead of a standard design, and naviate back and foward.

We clicked the "Next" button for Step 2 and our data were automatically drawn from our Address Book. We did a minor amount of editing and clicked the "Next" button for Step 3 where we chose to format our cards as 10 3.5"x2" cards. After clicking the "Finish" button, our data were tranferred to the standard design. Then, we highlighted and deleted the two blue squares, chose "Place image" from the File menu, navigated to our web site logo on our hard drive and imported it and sized it using the "handle squares" on the image. The result is shown below in the main application window.

Also shown are the three floating palettes and the image selector in the left pane. One can use any of the tools to spruce up one's business card but we are happy with the standard result. Except for the time browsing all of the designs, it took us just a couple of minutes to create the business card above.

How about the rest of the Macs Only! staff? By clicking the "Change Person" button (third from right next to the color wheel) anybody in our Address Book can be selected and their data automatically imported into the same card design and saved. In less than 2 minutes, we had a card image for each staff member.

The printer is calibrated using the "Calibrate Printer" command under the File menu to move the images left-right, up-down. It is best just to print one card (select 1"copy" in the print dialog box) until one is sure the calibration is correct. We printed our cards with a small extra blank strip down the right side and across the bottom with our Brother MFC 3100C onto quality inkjet paper. Our calibration settings for this are +12 verical and -18 horizontal. We determined these settings by printing out one card and the "Print Calibration Sheet" from the Calibrate Printer command under the File menu on regular paper and then holding the two sheets up to a light together. This setting minimizes the number of cuts (2 vertical and 5 horizontal) to get the 10 business cards. The cards look great on inkjet paper but now we need some real card stock to print them out.

In summary, BusinessCard Composer v1.1 is a terrific application for making business and personal cards. We created a super business card using the standard 1-2-3 Assistant so BCC is incredibly easy to use and obtain great results. But if you are an artist, the sky's the limit. BusinessCard Composer costs a reasonable $39.95. A demo version is available for download from BeLight Software.