Business Card Designer Plus Review and Guide

This review of Business Card Designer Plus is meant to assist anyone thinking of investing in a business card program. It points out both the good and the bad aspects of the program in order to assist you to make an informed choice.

I spent quite a while trying to figure out what exactly the difference between this business card program and Print Designer Gold was. The two programs look exactly the same and are pretty much the same program.

The difference, I found out, is simply that this is a stripped-down version of Print Designer Gold and it does not allow you to make mailing labels, envelopes, post cards, CD Labels, DVD labels and signs. It is strictly for business cards.

This works out great since you can still get the power of Print Designer Gold in designing your business cards with a huge cost saving over buying the entire package. If you don’t need the extra stuff and are sure you will only need to design and print business cards this is okay.

So the following review for Business Card Designer Plus is exactly the same as that for the Print Designer Gold, with minor differences to cater for the toned down functionality of Business Card Designer Plus.

Look and feel
The interface is very friendly and easy to use. The property editor on the right hand side is particularly useful as it gives you tips and directions on how to use each tool that you select. This is very good for learning the program but also saves you having to go to the help files.

Templates
Good selection of templates in various categories. So many they can’t be counted without a lot of trouble.

Level of technical know how required
The program requires very little technical knowledge if your interest is simply in designing and printing business cards. But if you want to get into its other capabilities, such as labels and bar codes, you may need to take a little more time to learn more about how to use it.

However, with the help available, the property editor and the tips that come up every now and then this should be easy too.

Formats
Print Designer Gold Project (pdg) is the saving format. You can also save graphics as png, jpg, bmp and emf.
Resolution is up to 1200 dpi.

Trial version functionality and restrictions
15 day limitation on trial version plus watermark on printing, otherwise it is fully functional.

Print sheet stock and layout options
Paper stock that can be designed for include: APLI, Avery, NEATO, Formtec, Herma, MAACO, NEATO, plain paper and printshop.

The layout and printing options are fully customizable to suit your requirements. A preview window in the printing section is very useful for this purpose.

Graphic design capability
You can draw basic shapes with the program. One very unique feature is its picture importing button. This allows you to preview thumbnails of the photos in a selected folder so you have no trouble choosing. You can also acquire the photo directly from your scanner.

In addition to this there is a “linked picture” option which should allow you to edit the photo in another program and not have to keep importing it into Print Designer Gold after every edit. The changes reflect automatically.

The “personal data base” is great for handling different sets of data for different business cards and a good time saving feature. This can be linked to any Text, CSV, Excel, Access, DBase, Paradox database or any external database through ADO or ODBC.

System Requirements
Business Card Designer Plus Works on Windows Vista/XP/2003/2000/ME/98SE or later.

Value for money
At US$29.95 the price is standard for a business card program, but given the functionality of the program it is a bargain and you definitely get more value than you are paying for compared to other programs.

For an extra 20 dollars you can get the complete version of Business Card Designer Plus that allows you to do labels, postcards and all, but only if you really need them. If not, settle for Business Card Designer Plus.

Overall Score out of five