Freehand For Business Cards?

Q: Freehand for business cards? Trial user here, still contemplating whether FH is the program I need. Basically, I do graphic work only for web sites, but have been asked to adapt the logos I do for business cards and stationary. My clients are mainly small businesses, and want to print on their office inkjets. I was attracted to FH for DPT mainly because the interface is comfortably similar to Fireworks, and I figure that from now on, I'd save time by first creating in FH and then exporting into FW, and, one day, Flash. But although the stationary templates that come with the program look great, I'm puzzled by how to actually format for printing onto Avery business cards. (Exporting into Word, which sets up the page properly for printing, produced poor resolution.) So, how can I print directly from FH, which produces such crisp results? Must I measure all the perforated lines and margins on the Avery sheets and then manually create a similar onscreen sheet using guides? Or am I being totally brain dead, and is there a convenient shortcut that I simply haven't yet discovered?

A: Yes, you can use FreeHand to lay out business cards and stationery. You will have to use guides and measure the layout of the paper, so that when the cards are printed, they

hit inside the perf area. Once you get a template set up, you can always use the template and not have to measure OR set up a new sheet each time. If your client is on a Macintosh OR a PC and they don't have FreeHand, what you could do is export the business card file as a PDF, so they can print the cards when they need some from Adobe Acrobat Reader. You could also do the letterhead the same way, but they would not be able to type out their letter before printing. They would have to print out the letterhead from Acrobat, then run the letterhead back through the printer and print the body of the letter on the letterhead from Word or something like that.