When a Non-Artist Needs Some Artful Presentation

As with a lot of people who run small businesses, I have little skill or talent when it comes to art or design. Yet I often find myself having to create a brochure, newsletter, Web page, business card, presentation or document that requires graphics.

I’ve occasionally hired graphic professionals to help me out, but sometimes I don’t want to spend the money or the time. So I’ve learned to rely on my limited skills and my PC to help me out when I need something that looks good. My goal is to create something that’s simple and pleasant to look at as it reinforces whatever message I want to get across.

There are scores of graphic software packages for dressing up everything from presentations to annual reports, but not all are suited for the average small business. Many are oriented toward consumers, with lots of “canned art” a business owner would never use.

Those aimed at graphic professionals or corporate art departments are often too complicated and expensive for those of us who have only an occasional need to dress up a document or presentation.

What many small businesses need are easy-to-use and inexpensive programs that let you focus on creating business documents.

Office Graphics 2000 (Windows, $29.95) from Santa Monica-based Streetwise Software (https://www.swsoftware.com) fills the bill. The CD-ROM contains several programs that either work alone or in conjunction with Microsoft Office 97 and Office 2000.

The CD-ROM comes with Professor Franklin’s Instant Photo Effects, By Design Office, Art Alive 3-D and photo album software that lets you catalog your graphic images for easy retrieval. Taken as a whole, the product provides you with just about everything you’d need.

Professor Franklin’s Photo Effects is a general-purpose photo editor that you can use with photos from a scanner or digital camera. It doesn’t have as many bells and whistles as some photo editors, but it’s simple and to the point.

Once you open a photo, the program displays a choice of functions such as auto correct, brightness/contrast, focus and color correction. Click on any of these and it immediately presents you with alternative views of your image that you can choose if they suit your purposes better than the original.

There is only one thing I don’t like about this program. Some of the advanced features that appear to be in the program are actually teasers. When you go to use them, you’re told you need to pay to upgrade the program.

I’d rather they just call this a basic program (which is all most people need) and leave out the phantom advanced features. If you do need the advanced features, you can upgrade online for $19.95.

By Design Office, which also comes on the CD-ROM, lets you add and manipulate graphic images from within Microsoft Word, PowerPoint or Excel. Once installed, you can access the program from the File menu in any of these Microsoft programs. I used it in Word to create a letterhead, a business card and a sample newsletter.

The chief attractions of this product are speed and simplicity. You may not be able to create the most innovative or unique publication in the world, but it will be good enough for most purposes.

Personally, I like the fact that it works inside popular Microsoft applications, because it leverages the skills you may already have. Because I already know Word, I was productive with this program within five minutes, which is a lot faster than it would have taken me with even the most easy-to-use stand-alone program.

The Art Alive 3-D part of the program is actually a stripped-down version of a pretty sophisticated 3-D modeling program. You can select a predrawn image or download one from the company’s Web site, for a total of about 500 models to choose from.

With this program you can rotate an image to any angle, adjust the lighting and change the background. Unfortunately, you can only use the 3-D images it gives you. Creating 3-D images from scratch is outside the perimeters of this program.

Office Graphics 2000 isn’t available for the Macintosh, but Mac users have a number of graphic programs to choose from, including Adobe PhotoDeluxe and Kai’s Soap, each of which costs about $40. PrintShop Ensemble ($40) is designed for the consumer market but is usable by businesses.

Another option is “AppleWorks” ($99, and formerly “ClarisWorks”) which, in addition to word processing, spreadsheet and database tools, contains fairly powerful painting and drawing tools, along with a module for creating charts and graphs.

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Technology reports by Lawrence J. Magid can be heard at 1:48 p.m. weekdays on KNX (1070). He can be reached at larry.magid@latimes.com. His Web site is at https://www

.larrysworld .com. On AOL, use keyword “LarryMagid.”