Business cards guide
An effective business card is a card that looks great, feels great and clearly defines what its owner’s business does so that is easily remembered by the person to whom is given.
View more business card examples at:
- 18 smokin’ hot business card designs at freelanceswitch.com
- A collection of 70 various cool business cards at fubiz.net
- 36 beautiful business card designs at dzineblog.com
- Free design templates for download at jukeboxprint.com
- Boutique style designs at phrizbie-design.com
- A variety of cool business card designs at dotcommogul.net
- Showcasing some very cool business card design approaches at inspiredology.com
- A collection of business card designs used by bloggers at brianyerkes.com
- Some cool business card designs from various designers at francescomugnai.com
- A gallery of awesome business card designs and ideas at faveup.com
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Things to consider:
- Size - use one of the international standard sizes.
- Bleed - add bleed area
- Resolution - use high resolution images.
- Font size - not too big and not too small
- Looks - make it visually appealing.
Read the nine most common business card blunders in this article by Patricia Schaefer.
Size
Different regions of the world have accepted different business card dimensions but the most common size is 89mm × 51mm (3,5″ × 2″).
| Standard | Dimensions (mm) | Dimensions (in) |
| ISO 7810 ID-1 Credit card sized | 85.60 × 53.98 | 3.370 × 2.125 |
| ISO 216 A8 sized | 74 × 52 | 2.913 × 2.047 |
| Australia, New Zealand | 90 × 55 | 3.54 × 2.165 |
| Canada, United States, The Netherlands | 89 × 51 | 3.5 × 2 |
| Japan | 91 × 55 | 3.582 × 2.165 |
| IT, UK, FR, DE, ES | 85 × 55 | 3.346 × 2.165 |
| Czech Republic, Hungary | 90 × 50 | 3.543 × 1.968 |
| People’s Republic of China | 90 × 54 | 3.543 × 2.125 |
Bleed area
Add a bleed area. Business cards are printed in large number of copies with a digital press or offset. This process requires trimming the edges of the paper after it’s printed. The standard bleed size can vary from one printing company to the other but generally is 3mm (0.125 inches). Read more about bleed here.
Font size
Depends on the font you’re using but a good guideline is to use a type size no smaller than 7-8 point. The name / title point can be a little larger; i.e. 9 point, and the company name usually looks good at about 12-15 point.
Color space
In order for the colors on the final printed product to look as close as possible to the colors you chose on your PC display, you should work in 4 color CMYK mode. RGB color space may print off-color, which may be unacceptable for the customer. Spot colors are OK if they can be converted to CMYK or are absolutely required for the design.
Image quality
Just like in most templates for printing purposes, the image placeholders should have high 300 DPI of resolution.
Content
The most common features of a web-to-print business card template are:
- Text fields for the card owner’s name and title (position) in the company
- Multiline text fields for the postal adress
- Text fields for the email address and website URL
- Text fields for the Phone/Fax/Mobile numbers (some may need to be optional). Learn how to do that here.
- Replaceable images for the owner’s photo and company logo. Learn how to do that here.
Other usefull articles on this subject
You can view some more guides and articles about designing business cards at:
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- CD/DVD case cover guide
- Greeting cards guide
- CD/DVD labels guide
- Postcards guide
- Brochures guide
- Outdoor signs guide
- Poster guide
- Newspaper Ad Guide
- T-Shirts guide
- Books guide
- Internet banners guide
- Outdoor sign sizes
- Book sizes
- Card & letter sizes
- Web buttons
- Web tabs
- Tabbed web designs
- Books for web-to-print
- Types of web buttons
