Business Card Design Tips

Get the business card shop to help you design

Your business card can be fully prepared by yourself and submitted to us for printing, you can submit graphics or a draft for us to work with, or we can design your business card for you from scratch.

Our graphic designers are well experienced with many years of experience. Our company's drive is customer satisfaction and pride in our work. We are not happy unless you, our client is happy and be will never accept work that we ourselves are not happy with.

We feel all our past work is a reflection on our company and so we strive to please our customers with designs that are both eye catching and also very importantly fufill their intended role. Don't hesitate to contact our friendly designers for any enquiry you have.

Design tips:
Tips for preparing and designing your business card

- Software
- Size of your design/artwork
- Colours - Will my printed piece look exactly like it does on my computer monitor?
- Images - Which format should i use?
- Text

Software
We recommend the use of CorelDRAW 9.0 for designs supplied by yourself. For image processing we advise the use of Adobe Photoshop. We do however accept a wide range of digital formats that you can find detailed in our FAQ.

Size of your design/artwork:
Our business cards standard size is: 90x54mm, but when designing 1.5mm is needed on each side to be included for the cut. This means that all self supplied artwork and finished cards need to be 93x57mm in size. All irregular sizes also need to contain this 1.5mm 'buffer'. The image bleed (images you want to run right to the edge) should be included in this 1.5mm space.

Will my printed piece look exactly like it does on my computer monitor?
There are some small differences. Scanners and digital cameras create images using combinations of just three colors: Red, Green and Blue (called "rgb"). These are the colors that computers use to display images on your screen. But printing presses print full color pictures using a different set of colors: Cyan (blue), Magenta (red), Yellow and Black (called "cmyk"). So at some stage your rgb file must be translated to cmyk in order to print it on a printing press. This is easily done using an image editing program like PhotoShop, PhotoDeluxe, or Corel PhotoPaint.
Caution: It's Best If You do the RGB-to-CMYK Conversion of Your Images!
You will have more control over the appearance of your printed piece if you convert all of the images from rgb to cmyk before sending them to us. When we receive rgb images, we do a standard-value conversion to cmyk, which may not be perfectly to your liking. We want you to be happy, so please, take the time to prepare your file properly. We cannot be responsible for sub-par results if you furnish low-res images or rgb images.
Be aware that it is possible to make colors in rgb that you can't make with cmyk. They are said to be "out of the cmyk color gamut". What happens is that the translator just gets as close as possible to the appearance of the original and that's as good as it can be. It's something that everyone in the industry puts up with. So it's best to select any colors you use for fonts or other design elements in your layout using cmyk definitions instead of rgb.

* Due to the printing process the colour may have some disparities, allow for an error of 10% in the colour degree when printing. This should be taken into account when ordering as no refund is available for what is detailed above.

RGB print color example CMYK print color example

Images - Which should i use?
When scanning your own images it is best to use either bmp, tif. or eps format. Using these image formats will best preserve the color and sharpness of your picturest.

File formats like gif or jpg compress the pictures colour and pixel resolution and this can cause colour shifts and blurriness. Since jpg and gif are the most predominant image formats on the web, it follows that it's not a good idea to simply lift an image from someone's website and use it in your layout.

You should scan your images using a resolution of 300dpi at the final dimensions you intend to use them so that your colours will look smooth, and hard objects will look sharp. In other words don't scan at 300dpi and then enlarge the picture by 200% in your layout program! This is another reason why you should not use images that are lifted from websites; they are probably only 72dpi in resolution and will look very blurry if printed on a printing press.

If you are using pictures from your digital camera they will work just fine if they are jpgs; the quality of jpg images from digital cameras seems to be much better than jpgs that are used on the web. You must do the math to make sure that it is high enough in pixel resolution though. For instance, if your camera puts out a typical image of 1280 x 960 pixels at 72dpi you get about 17" x 13" of photograph (at 72dpi); this is the same amount of detail as an image which is 4" x 3" at 300dpi so it's safe to reduce or enlarge that image in Publisher up to about 4" x 3" in dimension.

Text
Text should be positioned at least 3mm from the edge as to avoid the writing being cut by the die. Text should be double checked before submission. Such a simple thing can often be overlooked but we have had numerous cases of this simple error which could have been adverted with the double checking of addresses and telephone numbers.
Make sure all text formats used in your design are sent to us with your digital copy of your design. If you are unsure how to do this one of our technichians will advise you.

It's best not to colorize small text. What happens is that all printing presses have a little bit of variance in the consistency of the position of the different color plates. This is called misregistration. The cyan, magenta, yellow and black portions of the text characters don't line up exactly. So the result is little colored halos around the characters. It's ok to use colored text on large, headline type, or smaller sizes down to about 12 point size, but much smaller than that will be too noticeable and you won't like it. The same thing holds true for white (knock-out) text on a dark or colored background. You can do it but don't use point sizes smaller than about 12 point. Otherwise the words may be hard to read and it will look unprofessional. Examples of this blurring is shown below (blown up text):

blurred text example 1 blurred text example 2

Be careful when using backgrounds and photos behind text. If not done correctly the text may 'blend into' the background and be very difficult to read. If you want this effect on your business card, the best way to go about it is to lighten your photo or change the opacity, which is easily down in photo editing software such as Paint Shop or Photoshop.