14 DAY TRIAL // Starting up a business requires a good idea. To make it grow, promotion is absolutely necessary. One of the key aspects involved in promoting is having a business card. Despite the fact very few entrepreneurs think that the looks of the business card are not essential, having an identity emphasizing card is pretty much essential.
Most business men have the opinion that the most important thing about a business card is the information on it. That is actually true if your business is unique and the customers are very much in need of your services. However, to make your business different some marketing and psychology concepts are needed. Printing all the contact details on a rectangular cardboard is no different than daubing them on a piece of paper.
The bottom line is that a mix of colors and a “mis-en-place” will definitely contribute to creating the customer the best of impression about your business.
Creating your own business card is relatively easy. The support you want your model to be printed on and the cutting are the difficult parts. Producing good looking cards nowadays generally involves a good editing software. The price tags for this category of programs range from free to about $30. It is not a very costing investment if you think of the business benefits that may come.
Business Card Studio is a $24.95 solution for creating business cards. The application is helpful enough to supply a list of templates for you to start from. As soon as getting around gets comfortable enough, you can venture into creating your own card starting from scratch.
To make your work easier, Business Card Studio comes with a wizard to guide you through the entire process of creating your card when it comes to choosing a template. Step one allows choosing the type of project that the user wants to create. The three options available are creating a project from a template (the easiest and quickest way to reach your result), create an empty project (start from scratch) and opening an existent file (continue the previous work).
The thirteen templates available are not the best examples to suit your needs, but they can be customized and changed to better reflect the personality of your business. All the pictures can be modified and even deleted and the user can load his/her own pictures like the company logo from the PC. The templates are already filled with default information, but step number three of the wizard lets you change the default details with your own.
The basic info on your business card are name, company, address, e-mail, website address, phone and fax numbers and you also have to load the company logo and set a background. Although creating a business card from template is really quick and easy due to the wizard accompanying you through every step of the operation, it is a bit restrictive and you will not get your chance to test your imagination. Some of you may even be disappointed by the fact that you can only choose the elements provided by the developer and there isn't the possibility of changing too much.
If you want to build a business card to your taste, there is the chance of creating one from scratch. The blank work space can soon be changed by making the right adjustments in the Property Editor (on the right of the application window). The background can be solid or gradient or you can load up an image from the computer. All the rest of the details are only up to your imagination and the image you want the card to reflect about your business.
The toolbar on the left provides shapes (line, box, ellipse, text and image). The lines can very easily be converted to curves and allow the user to create round shapes or even a frame for the company logo. Once you have created all the detail spaces and added the information, then moving them around inside the card is a matter of click and drag.
The stiff lines can be made curvier by means of the curve edit tools available at the bottom of the application window. The colors and borders of the shapes can be modified from the Property Editor. In order to find more options of the Property Editor you will have to hover your mouse over the little arrows at the both ends of the window. The options will scroll up or down and make your settings.
There is some rigidity in what concerns the text as you cannot create gradient effects of the letters themselves. The background can be modified in this sense, but not the letters.
The Good
Very easy to use application. The Help file will give the answers to all your questions and even supply tutorials on how to use the line bending option. Also, the templates can be modified for fast learning the works of the program.
The Bad
Being a shareware Business Card Studio has a series of restrictions besides the 21 days trial. Not being able to create more than one page per document in the unregistered version is one of them. The registration reminder nag screen is indeed a nag as it will pop up when least expected in the right lower corner of your desktop.
The Truth
Business Card Studio is an easy way to create pretty nice effects on your cards. Mirroring horizontal and vertical objects is one feature you are not going to find in too many similar softwares. However, the program is deficient in providing the user the undo option. There is no trace of it and I think that when working with curves and adding new points such an option would really come in handy.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
