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.

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.

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.

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.

Next, add in your personal details:

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

Further reading:

Creating your business card design using templates

Working with and choosing the right fonts

Choosing the right company for your logo design

Understanding spot and process colours

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