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DealBITS Drawing: Win a Copy of Swift Publisher 5

One of the unexpected lessons I’ve learned from talking to Apple consultants, resellers, and IT admins about their communications needs is that print is far from dead. Social media may get all the attention, but a postcard, handout, or a table tent will get better results.

Happily, most print pieces are similar — projects like brochures, flyers, catalogs, newsletters, menus, doorknob hangers, postcards, calendars, and certificates. A tool like Adobe InDesign has power to spare if you want to create a tri-fold brochure, but you’ll spend more time measuring out columns and setting up guides than you will on your actual content.

That’s the beauty of BeLight Software’s Swift Publisher. Rather than presenting you with a blank page or offering just a handful of sample templates, Swift Publisher focuses the entire process around the type of piece you want to create, providing over 300 professionally designed templates. Although it focuses on print output, Swift Publisher offers a Social Media template category, which provides a variety of Facebook cover and Twitter header templates.

Once you pick a template, Swift Publisher provides a solid set of layout tools, with master pages, support for unlimited layers (along with built-in background and foreground layers), and standard graphic and text capabilities. Of course, special projects like calendars have their own controls.

BeLight includes over 2000 clip-art photos and illustrations, and another 40,000 are available in the $9.99 Extras Pack (which also contains 100 fonts). You can access your pictures from Photos or search for an image on the Internet directly from within the app. Once you’re happy with your project, you can print it directly from within the app, but on the assumption that you may need many copies or non-standard stock, Swift Publisher lets you export to PDF, TIFF, EPS, PNG, and JPEG for sending to a print shop or
other uses.

The latest version, Swift Publisher 5, supports the Touch Bar on the MacBook Pro, features significantly improved performance, offers a spread view mode, and improves both text box linking and layer management.

If you’d like to try your hand at designing a calendar as a holiday gift, or any other print piece, enter at the DealBITS page before midnight on 17 December 2017 for a chance to win one of five copies of Swift Publisher, regularly priced at $19.99. All information gathered is covered by our comprehensive privacy policy.

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