Classy Business Designs and Brochures Made Easy

In minutes, Canon's inexpensive Design Essentials lets you tailor professional design schemes for your business materials.

John Goddard, special to PC World

• Email
• RSS
• 0 Comments

Is your business suffering from an identity crisis? Many small companies fail to attract customers because they don't put much time or money into designing great-looking marketing materials. Unless you're a graphic artist, it's unlikely you have time or training to grapple with complex graphics programs. If you can't afford a (very pricey) professional service, Canon has a way to make your budding business look like an established firm--for less than $60.

Canon's Design Essentials offers a plethora of design templates that can help create a whole new image for your business. To give your materials a consistent look, each template includes matching sets of letterheads, envelopes, brochures, menus, business cards, floppy disk labels, and other corporate materials. All you need to do is pick a design, make any adjustments that suit you--such as a new color combination or your logo--and then replace the dummy text with your own.

Stylish Selection

As a working graphic artist, I was highly cynical. To me business graphics apps are the rattan furniture of the graphics world: relatively inexpensive and serviceably simple--but rarely eye catching. It didn't take long to realize that Design Essentials is a program with a difference.

I inserted Canon's CD-ROM into my drive. Within minutes--and 36MB later--I was poking around the interface, shuffling through 297 layout templates, and examining the program's 411 images. Instead of gaudy clip art (which is largely inappropriate for business), Ransom Note-type fonts, and tacky templates, I was faced with page after page of elegantly designed layouts. Similar collections are usually as gratifying as a weeded-through collection of baseball cards, but Canon offers first-rate stuff. The smart color schemes and stylistic nuances in every graphic clearly showed themselves to be the work of talented design professionals. I'm still floored.

Okay, the interface is too sparse for graphics pros, but for anyone else, it's just right in its simplicity. I particularly liked that I could change elements to suit my needs without being barraged by jargon or dialog boxes. After opening a template, I selected what I wanted to change, and then clicked the Text, Images, or Color button on the right of the screen. With a few clicks of my mouse, I easily imported photos, logos, and clip art. And any changes I made to a graphic were automatically updated wherever else it appeared in the project--a real timesaver. I also appreciated the way each template offered a variety of color schemes. And if somewhere along the way I changed my mind, I could undo as far as ten steps back.

Some Imperfections

As much as I enjoyed this program, there are a few blemishes. Although EarthLink Sprint TotalAccess is bundled for Web access, Canon's omits Web page templates (online brochures). Too bad--most graphics programs today include Web tools. And while you can alter or import text, and change typographic attributes--such as font size or letter spacing--there are no controls to hide orphaned words, which occasionally dangle alone below a paragraph. Also missing are live previews to help you experiment with changes. Instead you have to apply changes to see them, and then press Cancel to back out of a dialog box to undo the change.

In line with Design Essentials' simple motif, there are no advanced tools for making radical design changes. Still, the tools that resize, reorganize, repeat, or replace any element in a layout are enough for the lay user. (Of course, if you really dislike an individual element, there's always the Delete key.) You double-click text to bring up the Type Options box. Double-click a graphic to make the Move, the Crop, and the Zoom tools appear. Fortunately, the templates are so well designed that aside from changing color schemes or adding type and logos, it's unlikely the average user will need to change much else.

Canon's Design Essentials is one of best and most accessible business graphics programs I've seen. A user can pin down a stylish corporate design in minutes, not hours. That way you can concentrate on talking about your business rather than worrying how it looks. All in all, you won't find a faster way to create sophisticated business materials this easily.

• Email
• Print
• RSS