Art Text 1.0.3

Reviewed by Robert Pritchett

Belight Software’s apps are always a delight and each app and release just keeps getting better!

Here we were thinking how we were going to update our website navigation buttons, etc. and so we began playing with 3D and foreground reflections. After spending a lot of time using Cararra Pro 5 (http://www.maccompanion.com/macc/archives/May2006/Software/Carrara5Pro.htm) that offered beautifully rendered landscapes and fantastic reflections and lighting options and even movement, it was just too much detail over substance (the old elephant gun shooting the gnat scenario), and then BeLight came to our rescue.

Over the years, there have been similar programs that tweak and manipulate text and there are even some attempts in MS Word to play with 3D, but BeLight made the process amazingly fun to use and to export. The Tour link shows how they implement Vector transformations and Bezier splines, fills, outlines, gradients, textures, shadow and glow effects and shading.

There are also around 300 pictograms that come with the program.

If you go to our website, you will see the text format we would “logically” pick, since we are Pro Mac. Instead of

we went for

Disco was more reminiscent of what we had before with our earlier fruity theme, but the Mac OS X typestyle gave us the more mature, professional look. We also used it for our new section banners with backgrounds. Below is the Artistic “Hameleon” style with a grey background.

If we really wanted to “roll our own”, that capability is available. We could actually add our own images and play with text decorations, if we so desired. But there are over 50 or so pre-designed styles to choose from! It’s almost like walking into a candy store. Those typestyles can be adjusted as well and/or shaded with the looks of glass, metal or plastic and use around 20 adjustable vector shapes or splines. The best part? They are all exportable to either files or the Clipboard in just about any graphic format supported by Mac OS X. Talk about instant gratification!

Installation was a breeze and I was productive within minutes.

So go get your art deco on and turn text into art with Art Text. BeLight. BeHappy! BeProductive!! And have a lot of fun doing so.

Disclosure: By the way, we are a BeLight Software affiliate. We like their apps so well, we put our money where our mouth is.