Text doesn’t have to be boring black-and-white. Art Text can turn even the most unadventurous-looking words into visual treats for posters, banners, logos, newsletters – anywhere you need eye-catching text. Chock-full of templates, materials, effects and motion tools, the app can even transform type into animated text you can export as a video or GIF.

What we love: How Art Text is both fast and endlessly flexible. In a hurry? Pick a template to instantly convert your text into anything, like a 3D neon sign or a carved chunk of cheese. Want to get creative? Dig into the app’s tools to add shadows and glows, squash text into 3D forms and apply masks that make your objects look worn or ethereal. Or go beyond type to fashion icons and logos from symbols, smart shapes and custom vector elements.

Quick tip: The best way to learn the app’s tools is by experimenting. Open a few templates from the Design Gallery, examine how they’re constructed and take note of interesting settings in the Inspector. Create a new document and enable combinations of distortions (under Effects) to see how they work together. And don’t forget animation: click the video button and add the current design as a key frame, make changes and add another next key frame and so on – Art Text will smoothly animate the transitions.

Meet the creator: BeLight Software has been crafting design software for Mac – including Live Home 3D, Swift Publisher and Amadine – for two decades. VP Andrew Cherfas says Art Text was partially inspired by the Aqua UI controls in early versions of Mac OS X: “It was not trivial to create a similar effect, so we decided to make it easy. After that, many more effects were added.”