Review by Bob Carpenter, ApplePickers Macintosh User Group
Developer: BeLight Software, Ltd. (http://www.belightsoft.com)
Price: $39.95 (Standard version), $49.95 (Retail version)
Upgrade from Art Text 1.x: $19.95
When we last left BeLight’s Art Text, we talked about a program that filled a niche. It allowed you to create stylized text. In allowing you to do that, it gave you tremendous flexibility in how you created that text. It allowed you to change everything from the style of the text to the direction that the light will hit your text.
Now fast forward about 18 months to the introduction of Art Text version 2. It still allows you to do everything you could do in version 1.x. It even keeps any custom styles or materials that you created in Art Text 1.x. However, it now can do a lot more and it’s even easier to use than before.
Interface changes
I think Art Text 2 goes the right way in changing to a tabbed interface instead of the boxes that flipped between fill and stroke and the materials. The other box flipped between shadow and glow and geometry. The new interface has three simple tabs: Effects (which includes your fill, stroke, and shadow/glow), Geometry (which allows you to form your text into different shapes and stretch that text in almost any way you wish), and Styles (which has either pre-designed one-stop looks or where you can save your own work into a style to be used at a later time). I found the new interface easier to get used to. I didn’t like how the old interface would change the look of your text simply by flipping the box around. The new interface allows you to choose a new tab and see what’s there without affecting your current work.
Hey, it has layers now!
They’ve also added a “Layer Bar” to Art Text 2. Yes, that’s right, Art Text now supports layers. For those of you who’ve used a program like Photoshop, you’ll know exactly what a layer is. However, if you don’t know, layers allow you to do two different things. One, you can try new things on a new layer and get rid of the layer if you don’t like what you tried. All of your work underneath that layer is unaffected. Yes, you can undo your work but it can be difficult to determine which steps you wish to keep and which steps you wish to remove. The second advantage of layers is that it allows you to easily move items in front or back.
This is especially useful because Art Text allows you to combine your text and graphics to create your own logo. In playing with the program, I used an included graphic and made it look like a watermark in back of my text. I did this by selecting the layer with the graphic from the layers panel and changing the opacity to a lower number which made the graphic more transparent.
Art Text allows you to easily move the layers around. All you have to do is drag one layer to the left or right of the other and it will change what’s in the foreground or background. My explanation makes it sound like you can only have two layers. That’s not the case. I’m just trying to make it easy to understand if you haven’t used layers before. In fact, I stopped at about 10 layers because it just got ridiculous for me after that. However, if you were working on an intricate logo, I could see how you could have many more layers for your work.
Template Gallery
Art Text 2 now includes a Template Gallery. This can be a nice place to start on your own design since there are plenty of high quality headings, buttons, icons, or logos from which to choose. This is another place where Art Text 2 has expanded beyond its initial design. You can now use it to create your own website buttons if you wanted to do so. You have the entire power of Art Text at your disposal to take their standard buttons and make them your own.
Gradients and Color
Art Text 2 also includes Linear and Radial gradients. Simply, that means your text can gradually change from one color to another in either a horizontal (linear) or in a ringed fashion from the center (radial). In keeping with Art Text’s customization, you can choose the three colors of the gradient and the angle from which it starts.
I bring up the colors here because it brings up an important point of how Art Text lets you pick your colors. Thankfully, it uses the standard OS X color selector instead of attempting to create a “better” one. The great advantage of this is you can use the “magnifying glass” in the upper left-hand corner of the color selector. You use this icon to select the color you want from any other picture or text. The real power of this is that the color you wish to select may be in a different window of a different program. The magnifying glass doesn’t care. This allowed me to open up the ApplePickers logo in Preview and use it to select the exact color of the logo and use it in my Art Text design. Once you know about the magnifying glass, it makes color selection a whole lot easier.
Customization and Textures
I haven’t gone into all of items that Art Text allows you to change. That’s simply because I don’t feel like writing a five page review! Whenever I started playing with something to see if I could achieve a certain effect, I never found that Art Text was holding me back because it wouldn’t let me change something. I did find myself just moving sliders and dials around just to see what might happen.
I will say that I found the geometry tab initially confusing because I would pick a text shape and it didn’t look like anything was changing. However, once I started moving the sliders off of 0 (no change), then the desired effect would take place.
Art Text 2 does add a 190 image texture library. No, I didn’t count them. I cheated and looked on their website. It’s nice to have that available since Art Text 1.x made you pick your own picture to use as a texture. That option is still available to you, but it’s nice to have some built-in options.
Documentation
Art Text 2 does have an included help file. It’s not that large, but it gives you enough to get started. They also have screencasts on their websites showing you how to create certain items. Honestly, I used the screencasts to get familiar with the interface and just used the help file if I wasn’t sure where to find something.
Quirk
When working with version 2.0.2, I ran into only one minor quirk (bug). If you save an Art Text document the first time, the dot inside the red button disappears. That means you don’t have any unsaved changes in the document. However, if you make changes later and you save your Art Text document, the dot won’t go away until you click somewhere in the window. The same thing happens when you make your first change after your first save. In that case, the red dot won’t appear until you click somewhere in the Art Text window. To be fair, I consider it more of a quirk because Art Text won’t let you quit the program without bringing up the “Don’t Save, Cancel, Save” dialog box if you attempt to quit it with an unsaved document. I’ve just gotten used to trusting that little dot to tell me if I’ve saved my document.
Recommendation
If you’re in the market for a program that allows you to create eye-popping text, logos, or web graphics, I’d definitely download the Art Text 2 demo and try it out. If you already own Art Text 1, the $20 upgrade is a no brainer. BeLight Software has added a lot to Art Text that makes it much more useful. At the top of the review, you’ll notice I mentioned a retail and standard version. The difference is the retail version comes with 50 Bitstream fonts. I’m sure licensing those fonts is the major reason for the $10 difference. However, Bitstream is a professional font designer and it shows in the fonts you’ll get. You can take a look at the fonts by going to this page:
http://www.belightsoft.com/products/resources/bitstreamfonts.php
You can also download the retail version from BeLight’s webpage so you don’t need to buy a physical box if you don’t want it.
As a smaller company, I’ve found BeLight to be very responsive to feedback. I readily admit my preference for small, independent developers. Since they don’t have the money to pay for large marketing budgets, their prices tend to be more reasonable and their support tends to have a more personal touch.
Posted under Reviews
This post was written by Moon Doggy on January 10, 2009
