BusinessCards MX

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on August 10, 2010

A good-looking business card can be the difference between being taken seriously and coming off as an amateur. With BusinessCards MX you could go either way; although it has some snazzy templates and it's not difficult to create an attractive card, there's the potential for sloppy formatting and bad design.

The program's interface is attractive and quite intuitive, and most users should be able to start making their business cards within moments of first launching the program. BusinessCards MX presents three choices to start with: users can open a template, launch the design wizard, or go directly to the editing interface. The program comes with a variety of templates that are organized by category, including animals, beauty, education, and medical, as well as templates that include some design elements but aren't profession-specific. For the most part these templates are attractive, but some of the themes include some pretty goofy-looking clip art that doesn't exactly scream, "I'm a professional." The program's design wizard lets users choose a layout for the card's text and then manually add backgrounds, images, and other elements. We liked the wizard--it was quite easy to use--but we did note that the address layout seemed to follow the Polish convention of putting the city before the street address. This can be fixed by manually dragging and dropping address elements to rearrange them on the card, but that can create imprecise spacing between elements and lead to a sloppy look if users aren't careful. The editor feature lets users create business cards freehand, a nice touch for those who are a little more comfortable with basic graphic design. The program's built-in Help file is brief but adequate. Overall, BusinessCards MX didn't knock our socks off, but it's not a bad choice for creating basic business cards without a lot of fuss.

BusinessCards MX installs and uninstalls without issues. We recommend this program to all users.

Editors' note: This is a review of the full version of BusinessCards MX 3.99. The trial version has watermark on output.