One of my all time favorite Mac applications from the so-called Classic (pre-OS X) era was a text manipulation tool called TypeStyler.
Nothing styled plain old text better on a Mac. Until ArtText. Think of ArtText as TypeStyler in the 21st century. Amazingly easy and creative text that becomes art.
Simply put, ArtText lets you take text—letters, words, phrases—and create superbly craft headings, web site graphics, buttons, logos, icons with complex graphic arrangements.
Type in a word or letters. Use the templates to create custom shading, outlines, colors, gradients, embossing, textures, glows, and so much more.
The latest version of ArtText continues to the tradition of point and click simplicity married to tremendous design flexibility. Included in ArtText 2.0 are over 200 buttons, heading, logo, and icon templates, all of which can be edited in seemingly infinite arrangements.
There are hundreds of shading materials from glassy to plastic to metallic. Choose from 600 vector icon designs, all of which can be manipulated—color, thickness, texture, shadow, and effects.
Text can be combined with background images. Text can be warped to any of nearly two dozen vector transformation shapes, which are adjustable.
The new version of ArtText supports multiple layers, where each layer maintains specific properties, though layers can also be blended in one of 11 blend modes. Multi document support has been added along with the simple ability to print your creation.
Creating text as art was once a complicated, tedious, and often expensive effort. Try to do text manipulation in Adobe’s Photoshop or Illustrator, and you understand. Yes, both make for great art, but the expense and learning curve are often prohibitive.
ArtText doesn’t really have a learning curve. Virtually everything about text or icons or buttons can be adjusted, manipulated, colored, filled, texturized without having to take a night course at a nearby community college.
Point and click is what made the Mac the darling of the computing world. With ArtText you’ll be closer to a point and click artist.
Text can be flipped, rotated, and layered. Text elements, such as background, foreground, and strokes, can receive nearly unlimited adjustments—shadow and glow effects, radial and linear gradients, color and text fill, plus many vector transformation shapes.
By supplying hundreds of vector icons and shapes, and with the Mac’s included fonts, text designers get a head start on complex graphic designs with point and click simplicity. Need background textures? Make your own or choose from nearly 200 in ArtText.
Warp text just like the old Postscript effects in TypeStyler of yesteryear. Apply any of 245 materials to your text creation to create glassy, plastic, metallic or other specific looks.
The beauty of such a tool is in the ease of use, many options, including export. ArtText graphics can be exported to JPEG, TIFF, PNG, EPS, PDF, and then dropped right into Apple’s Pages, iWeb, Keynote, or even Microsoft Office.
TypeStyler was one of my most cherished Mac tools for text manipulation and design creation. Alas, TypeStyler runs on Mac OS Classic. TypeStyler has been “Coming Soon!” for OS X for many years. ArtText is here now and highly recommended.
If you have a need or a knack for design, but don’t want the expense or difficulty of mastering Photoshop or Illustrator, the new ArtText is an excellent way to start. If you purchased a previous version of ArtText then you’ll get an upgrade discount on the new version.
Need to try before you buy? No problemo. ArtText is a free download so you can try it out during the trial period. Let us know what you think. ArtText is five stars.
About Ron McElfresh
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