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Art Text 2

$39.95
$19.95 upgrade from version 1
Free if you bought Art Text 1 after July 1, 2008


Early last week BeLight Software announced the release of Art Text 2. Art Text 2 makes creating attractive graphic elements for just about any type of project ridiculously easy. From icons to text banners and webpage buttons, Art Text 2 is a powerful tool for simplifying this process.

As an avid user of Art Text 1 I was always frustrated with the lack of any control over the size of the saved graphic. Basically, you created your graphic, selected export and whatever size it came out, that’s what you got. You’d then have to resize the graphic in another program which often times led to pixelation and less-than optimal results. With Art Text 2 BeLight addressed this, sort of. You can now specify what size the finished document is to be and you can even tell Art Text 2 to fit the graphic to the document size. What’s missing is an easy way to crop out the excess areas of the blank document surrounding your graphic. A “Crop document to graphic” option would be welcomed and Art Text 1 actually has this (Auto Select). I’m not sure why BeLight left it out of Art Text 2.

The other big frustration I had with Art Text 1 was the way in which you scrolled through and selected any of the included icons or symbols. There was this little selection window where you’d hold down a scroll arrow until you found what you wanted. The problem with this method is that the scrolling sped up the longer you hold the scroll arrow down so you have to let up every 10 images or so or it would get going so fast you’d fly right by what you were looking for. It would make my eyes literally go buggy and was actually much more frustrating than it sounds.

BeLight addressed this by placing these graphics is a PhotoShop-like “Layer Content” panel organized into broad categories: Transport, Animals, People, etc. You have no idea (unless you to are/were an Art Text 1 user) how welcomed this is. The only problem I’ve encountered with this new system is that upon opening the panel for the first time and then choosing Symbols, Art Text failed to render a scroll bar to scroll to the bottom of the list. This resulted in a bunch of images at the bottom of the window that I couldn’t access. This only happened the first time I launched Art Text so hopefully it was an isolated issue.

BeLight also added additional icons and symbols which is great but didn’t make them all that easy to access which isn’t so great. Once you find them you’re good but the first time accessing them it’s a little confusing. The first step is to start a new document: File>New or click one of the Headings, Logos, Icons, Buttons or New Blank buttons from the new Template Gallery. Using one of the options in the Template Gallery would be the easiest but for some reason BeLight chose not to include all of each type in the gallery. What they’ve appeared to have done is chosen a select few, doctored them up and then saved as examples in the Template Gallery. For Icons there are a total of 28 available in the Template Gallery compared to 590 that I counted when accessed through the Layer Content panel.

For the next step in our example, we’ll just click the New Blank button on the Template Gallery window. The user is then presented with the Art Text 2 work space that looks somewhat similar to the one in Art Text 1. However, instead of being blank as one would expect, BeLight pastes the text “Art Text” in the center of the document. This is no big deal, just sort of annoying.

One big difference between AT 1 and AT 2, though, is that BeLight chose to forgo the familiar OS X title bar. Instead you just have this smooth gray area that runs down to the top border of the actual document area. From a purely esthetic perspective I’m not too keen on it. I like an obviously delineated title bar. The new look also fall short from a usability standpoint: where the heck do you click so that you can drag the window to an uncluttered area of your computer screen? Click too low and nothing happens. For what ever reason BeLight decided to reject common OS X UI conventions and ejected the title bar.

Now that we have a “blank” (not really) document how do we paste in an additional icon or symbol? There is no obviously apparent way to do this. Buttons on the right of the workspace offer options for Fill (this is the default), Textures and Shading. Click any one of these and the “Art Text” filler text will change to the first option under that heading. Along the right hand side of the workspace there are 3 more options offered up in a tabbed interface: Effects (once again the default), Geometry and Styles. The tabs are supposed to resemble a tabbed notebook I guess but as to how they function differently than the aforementioned buttons is not readily apparent. Once again BeLight’s meandering from expected OS X UI conventions creates a usability deficiency.

To actually get to where one can add an icon or symbol you have to do one of the following: Window>Show Layer Content, click the “+” button located in the upper right corner of the layer in the layer area at the bottom of the workspace, double click on the existing layer in the bottom of the workspace or Layer>Add Layer. Any of these four options will open the Layer Content panel which is where you can access the included icons and symbols. Once you find the icon, symbol or shape you want to work with, select it and AT 2 will paste it over the “Art Text” text layer in a new layer. Just delete the “Art Text” layer and your ready to go. If this all sounds kind of clunky, it is. It would be so much simpler if you could just click the New Blank button, be presented with a blank document and workspace and then click an “Icon” (or similar) button to bring up the Layer Content Panel.

After the two frustrations I mentioned at the beginning of this review, probably the biggest and most welcomed new feature is the addition of Layers which I’ve already discussed. All modern image editing apps include this feature and now so does Art Text 2. Layers add so much in terms of functionality I’m kind of surprised that BeLight waited this long to add them. With layers, adding text to a symbol or icon is super easy and requires but a couple clicks of your mouse. The addition of Layers to Art Text 2 makes upgrading or buying for the first time, a no brainer especially if you do much web work.

Despite AT 2’s quirky and somewhat confusing UI, it’s a great app. I use it constantly for creating graphic elements for websites that I build, printed documents, etc. Once you get the hang of how BeLight does things, Art Text becomes a very powerful tool. There’s no way I could create the same beautiful, professional looking graphics without putting in some serious time learning PhotoShop Elements or Pixelmator. That’s time that I don’t have to spare, so for me Art Text 2 is worth every penny of the $20 upgrade fee I paid as a licensed owner of Art Text 1.

Art Text 2 is a fantastic app and I highly recommend it for just about anyone. Tons of new graphics and features make this a worthy update for up-graders. New users will find Art Text 2 a quality app that packs a real punch and comes preloaded with plenty of icons, symbols and shapes. The included art provides a great starting point for creating high-quality, professional looking graphics, so whether you’re needing to jazz up your website with graphic elements or spiff up your Pages (you’re not using Word are you?) report or Keynote presentation, Art Text 2 might be for you. Head on over to BeLight and download the demo. You’ll be glad you did.

Joe Henry

Long-winded disclaimer: One thing I have to mention here: I’ve bemoaned the fact that BeLight seems to not care a whole lot about OS X UI guidelines and has deviated from them quite a bit with Art Text 2’s UI. To be fair they also did it with Art Text 1, so this isn’t a complete surprise. Also, many other top notch developers have done the same: brothers Saulius and Aidas Dailide, creators of the awesome Pixelmator and Adobe (PhotoShop Elements 6) come to mind. The fact that an app doesn’t strictly adhere to generally accepted OS X UI conventions doesn’t really bother me unless doing so creates confusion. Aspects of Art Text 2’s UI do in fact confuse me and I’m sure I’m not the only one. Is it a deal breaker? Absolutely not!

I also want to state that I’m not, nor do I pretend to be, an expert on “generally accepted OS X UI conventions,” so any opinion I have regarding Art Text 2’s UI is purely subjective. Having used OS X since the day Apple released it I know how much these UI conventions have changed. I also know what I like and what I’m used to, however, and this is where my opinions are coming from.