How to design a business card yourself without it looking homemade
You do not need a designer to end up with a good business card, but you do need to make a few decisions the way a designer would. Most homemade cards go wrong in the same handful of places.
Start with the right canvas
Set up at 91 x 61mm at 300dpi in CMYK. That is the 85 x 55mm card plus 3mm of bleed all round. Draw a guide 3mm inside the trim and treat it as a wall: no text or logo crosses it. If your tool offers a business card preset, check its millimetres, because many default to the American size.
Decide what the card is for
A card is not a brochure. Its job is to let someone contact you and remember which conversation you were. That means a name, a role in plain words, one phone number, one email, and a website. Two phone numbers make people pause; a fax number dates you; a QR code is fine if it goes somewhere useful.
Six decisions that do the work
- One typeface, two weights. Your name in the heavier weight, everything else in the lighter one. Mixing three fonts is the fastest way to look amateur.
- Type big enough to read. Nothing under 7pt, and 8pt or 9pt for contact details. Designers shrink type to make space; readers cannot read it.
- Align everything to something. Pick a left edge and put every line on it. Centring some things and left aligning others is what makes a layout feel loose.
- Leave space. If the card feels empty, it is probably right. Filling the corners is what makes a card feel cheap.
- Two colours, or one plus black. Take them from your logo rather than picking new ones.
- Use a proper logo file. A logo dragged off your website is 72dpi and will look furry when printed. Find the original, or ask whoever made it.
Check it before it goes
Print it at actual size on your own printer and hold it. Read it at arm's length. Give it to someone else and ask them what you do. Then check the phone number digit by digit, because a wrong digit on 500 cards is 500 wasted cards, and it happens more often than anyone admits.
What to send the printer
A print ready PDF at 300dpi, CMYK, with 3mm bleed and fonts embedded or outlined. Send both sides as separate pages. If that sentence was hard work, send us what you have instead: our designers can set the artwork for you, quoted with the job, and you will see a proof before anything is printed. We print business cards at 85mm x 55mm on 400gsm silk or 300gsm uncoated card; standard matt laminated cards are the hardest wearing of the three. The same artwork can then carry across the rest of your business stationery, so your letterhead and cards actually match.
