Business Card Composer v. 2
In business, first impressions are important; but the professionalism and look of your business card is the second most important thing. I have met many people at Macworld Expos, MUG meetings, and other business gatherings. Although I dont remember their face, a well-designed business card will help refresh my memory. Sometimes plain white with black text is the appropriate look for some occasions, those of us that want to stand out, and speak in our business cards should take a look at Business Card Composer.
MORE...
Business Card Composer (BCC) is an exceptional tool for creating your own business card. You can choose to use plain black and white, but once you start messing around in the program, it will be hard to choose be plain. With a great selection of pre designed cards, with categories ranging from Business, Macintosh, Photo Designs, Unique, and Plain Text, you have over 150 preloaded designs. BCC integrates with address book to import your name, address, company and other info right into your card. After choosing your printing method ,which can be your machine, online print service or other print services like Avery or Formtec, BCC creates your card. From there, you can change the background image, look of the card, size of text and everything else about the card. Of course you can start with a blank card and via a sidebar, choose background, look, boxes, and your text content. I was looking for a list of features on the product and chose to look in help viewer for the software. The help file is great. Everything about the software is in there and any question you have is listed in the help file.
There are some features to this software that make it a joy to use. For one, BCC uses OS X technologies to help you design the card. It is a Cocoa application, so takes advantage of built in features. It is not a foreign land in BCC, you are at home with the same color and text boxes found in keynote, iChat and TextEdit. Just when I got my card how I wanted it with a great blue back ground, aqua stock image and my text just how I like it, I noticed the Properties pallete had some incredible options, to turn my backgroun into a fading gradient, lower the opacity or rotate my background. Also, if you decide to move images or text around, BCC gives you guider lines to make sure the items are evenly placed. It is a similar feature to that in Apples Keynote or Adobe Illustrator. If you get bored with the 50 built in background images, you can auto generate background images. The generated backgrounds are abstract looking but add some flare to your card. You can customize the format of your name, address or other info, and add titles like Fax: or Address: before your content automatically. The best thing about the font capabilities is alignment, importing from address book and shadow effects. Adding a soft shadow to your name looks great. You also have layers. For example you can send an image behind another so you can make an image flow into another with a gradient applied to each one. The final feature that tops it off is image search. If you cant find the right image by browsing your computer or via the built in images, you can search the internet. You can search for G4 or Baseball and the images will appear in the image gallery; then simply drag the images over to your card.
Now you have the perfect business card, but how do you save it? You can save in BCC format. This will allow you to open it in BCC for later editing. I recommend doing this first, but printer companies wont take this format. If you choosse to Export Card, you can save it as a TIFF or PDF. Most print shops prefer TIFF. You can even customize the bleed edges and other prefs in the export dialogue. You can also order prints of the card online from the file menu, and calibrate your printer to print the cards properly.
Business Card Composer is the best tool for printing cards your way. Mac users are creative and we dont need another company deciding how our cards look. This is the only tool for creating your own business cards. You can use your company logo, stock images or images off the net, you can auto generate backgrounds, munipulate your card in everyway and import your data easily. Then when it it press time, just export as a TIFF and send it to the printer. I love this program, and my next business card will be made bit BCC. I recoomend everyone trying it out at http://belightsoft.com/download then purchasing it at http://www.belightsoft.com/composer/buy Business Card Composer costs $39.95 and all users get free tech support. System requirements are OS 10.2 or higher. Find out more at http://belightsoft.com