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Review: Click 'n' DesignReviewed By: Bill Stiteler Review Date: August 22, 2002
I only recently started burning CDs, and now I can't stop. Sound cues and pre-show music for my latest show from iTunes. Gathering a Quark document to send to a printer. For jobs like these, or even just for creating a mix of songs, it doesn't really matter what my CD looks like. But soon, I'll start burning DVDs of my shows, most likely for grant proposals, for friends and family, and the like. And then the presentation will matter. There are a variety of labeling solutions available, but most of the high-end ones--like professional pressings and a dedicated CD labeler--are unnecessary for the small print runs I'll be making. Fortunately, with programs like Click 'n' Design 3D from Stomp, Inc., it's now possible to create professional-looking designs. My first impression of Click 'n' Design was that it was astonishingly slow for an OSX app, especially one with such a simple interface. As I used the program more, however, I began to realize that it actually has a very powerful desktop-publishing application underneath that simple interface.  Click 'n' Design assumes you're not a designer yourself, that you just want a clean, professional design quickly. It begins with a "Quickstart Wizard" that walks you, step by step, through the label creation process. From a comprehensive list of label templates (Avery and so on), select the one from which you're working. You can then select from a set of pre-made designs, ranging from the simple "Circular Design" with space for the name and contents of the CD, to the slightly more complex "Shareware" and "Weave." You also get your all-purpose "Political" of red, white and blue stripes, perfect for everything from fundraising for the League of Women Voters to fundraising for your militia group. Each design is customizable from inside the wizard, altering the color scheme and fonts to a limited degree. Once you've got that set up, you go into a graphic representation of your label sheet. If you need it quickly, you can click on the generic text ("Company Name") and change to your needs. The one problem with the default designs, however, is that although Click 'n' Design comes with an ample clip art library to add some flavor to your CD, the designs don't leave a lot of viewable space for them. The design make look white, but that white space is actually a background graphic in and of itself which has to be removed. This, however, takes into another area of Click 'n' Design, that of being a full-featured desktop publishing application for a very specific area. With it, you can create numerous text layouts, including an insane variety of 3D effects. The amount of control you have over these elements, for the environment they're used in, is amazing. Transparency on images, tinting, even adding bar codes.  The only problem I had with Click 'n' Design came in printing. Though I was using the exact Avery labels I had set up in the Wizard, the printing was off by about a half-inch on my HP Deskjet Cxi. I'm not sure if this was a problem with my printer or with Click 'n' Design. Since the printing has to be pretty exact to justify the trouble of using these labels, it would be great if Click 'n' Design came with a way of adjusting its location on the page. Again, I have no idea from where this offset problem is coming, but it completely negates the purpose of the product. Otherwise, Click 'n' Design 3D is an excellent product. Whether you're looking for a simple way to produce professional-looking labels or something which gives you the capabilities of creating very complex designs on your own, then this program has that for which you're looking. For $15, it's well worth the money, but don't just take my word for it, you can download a fully-functional trial version (30 day limit) for free from the website.
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