Designing your own Business Cards
Designing your own business cards is quite straightforward providing you have the necessary tools.
Rather than give program-specific details on the design of your card, it’s probably more useful to outline the various steps which should be easily accomplished whether you are using Word®, Publisher® etc. or one of the commercial professional programs such as Adobe In-Design®, QuarkXpress® etc.
Before you start, it’s always a good idea to check with your print supplier how they wish the artwork to be provided. Some will expect you to go the extra mile and supply the card 4 up, with crop marks & gutters if bleeds have been used. (Don’t worry if these terms are unfamiliar to you, all will be explained). A more helpful printer will ask that you supply your card 1 up, and then he will perform the neccessary card layout at his end.
Let’s get started.
1. Create your workspace
Many people set the size of their workspace to the final size of the card, e.g. 85mm x 55mm. I prefer to set the workspace to A4 as this will help the ‘visualisation’ process later on.
So, we now have a blank A4 page. Using one of the box drawing tools, draw a box and size to 85mm wide by 55mm deep. Now give the box a border stroke. 0.5 point is fine. You should now have an A4 sheet with a blank business card showing, as Fig. 1 below.
Fig. 1
2. Setting up guides
The next step is set up guides for your margins. We will aim to have a 5mm margin around the card. Where artwork ‘bleeds’ over the edge of the card will be covered later.
Start by zooming into the card so it fills your working window.
Next, you need to adjust your ruler to start at the top left corner of the card. The card will then be positioned on the page so: X = 0, Y = 0
Now, drag a guide acrosss to the 5mm position, and another to the 80mm position.
Now do the same vertically, drag a guide down to the 5mm position, and another to the 50mm position.
This is how it should look (guides shown as dotted lines):
The shaded area is your new working space on the card.
Fig. 2
3. Inserting the various elements.
Start by importing your logo, if one is to be used. Check with your printer what format your logo should be in.
Fig. 3
Next, add in your personal details:
Fig. 4
4. Adding ‘bleeds’.
Firstly, what are bleeds? If you have artwork that goes to the edge of the card, like a backgound photograph for instance, then this needs to stretch over the edge of the card by 3mm. The reason for this is: if the artwork is left touching the edge of the card, and not overlapping, then when the time comes to cut & trim the cards by the guillotine operator it’s possible, if the guillotine cuts the card wider by say 0.5mm, then there could be a white line down one edge of the card, which is quite unsightly.
Here is an exagerated example:
Fig. 5
As you can see, cutting the card slightly wide (when the image hasn’t been overlapped) leaves an unsightly white line, hence the need for bleeds.
Fig. 6
Here is the card with the correct bleed. The image, or colour, or any element that touches the edge of the card, is overlapped (‘bled’) by 3mm. If the guillotine cut is slightly innacurate, then it will not be noticable.
5. Passing over your artwork to your printer.
This will depend on what program you have used to generate your artwork. There are many resources for designing your business card, so worth checking them out also.
If you are using one of the pro packages such as In-Design® or QuarkXpress® then you will probably use the ‘Collect for Output’ function. Similarly, in Microsoft Publisher® there is a ‘Package for your Printer’ option however, the last time I looked at this program it output cards as a block of 10 or 12 on an A4 sheet. This is absolutely useless as far as sending to a commercial printer is concerned, as your printer will need to plan your cards to fit his own sheet size, which is unlikely to be A4.
If in doubt, leave the card showing as 1 up.
The easiest way is to give your print suppliers a call, tell them what program you’ve used to generate the artwork and they will advise on how to supply the file.
Hopefully the above has helped you with designing your own business cards.
Having read what you telling i disagree idea of designing your own business cards, there is much more to know in order to create a print ready file. i think most printers would agree that designing from blank easier then sorting badly designed files.
With respect, whether you agree or disagree makes no difference as there will always be lots of people who want to design their own business cards. I’ve been dealing with artwork sent in on a daily basis (nationwide) for the last 20+ years and have found many do get it right and also many do screw up and their artwork needs sorting.
The articles I write are aimed at helping those that want to have a go themselves, but need that extra bit of help. I always stress that it’s important to speak with the preferred print company beforehand, to get advice on how the artwork should be presented.
We have to remember, it’s not just professionals who own Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign etc. as these programs are very popular with many, so the more advice we can give to the inexperienced will only make our life a little easier when it comes to producing work generated from their artwork.
Of course, we can’t cover all eventualities in just one small article however, there is a lot more information spread out over other articles on the site so I do urge people to read up on whatever they can, before hitting the ‘send’ button.
I totally agree, it’s always best to start a design from a blank canvas, rather than fix badly-done artwork, but if people like to involve themselves with their company design it’s up to the professionals to help them achieve the best results.