Tutorial – How To Create Print Ready Standard Size Business Cards

Tutorial Details

• Program: Photoshop
• Version: CS4
• Difficulty: Easy
• Estimated Completion Time: 30 minutes

Step 1

Let’s start with an idea. If you create this for someone, chances are you have a basic sketch in front of you or at least in your mind an image of how this will look. If you are willing to sell your design as stock, make sure your work is as clean as possible. People like simple, obvious things. When you look at the card, you don’t want to search for the phone number hidden between some design elements do you? So the two things which must be highly visible on the first look is the name and the number. The rest is small text, which shouldn’t be left out. Only if that is the specific need, of course.

So, for this tutorial I’ve chosen a simple and easy design which is not that hard to follow. Nothing fancy or extraordinary, the focus of this tutorial is introducing you to the standards and a quick look on how this is made. Also, you might want to create a 2 sided card. For that, you’ll need to finish this side. Then you can copy it and remove unnecessary text areas and write a company name for example.

This is what we’re going to do today:

Step 2

The dimensions. Before we start, let me explain you how a business card is created. The print company needs a well set up card design, especially if you are serious about it. They might accept less sophisticated files but the end product will not be what the customer wanted. So, the process is the following: They print your card in a bigger size than the end-size. Why? Because they’ll cut it to the final size. Because of this, you’ll need to add a bleed area. The reason behind the name is that the ink will exist on the very edge of the paper as well.

The standard end-size is 3.5" by 2". Bleed area means an extra 0.25" in both directions. Which means 0.125" on each edge. So the working size will be 3.75” by 2.25”.

Step 3

Start by creating a new document. File -> New. Fill out the dimensions – width: 3.75 inches and height 2.25 inches. (If you are not working in inches you can switch here. Or set it in Edit -> Preferences -> Units & Rulers.) Set the color profile to CMYK. It’s important! Do not miss it or you are going to be in some trouble. It’s better to set it in the beginning than in the end when you are finished, and say: oops it should’ve been CMYK. You change the color profile then bam all your colors look different. Don’t worry I’ve got a solution for that problem too but let’s just stay safe for now. Last but not least 300dpi is a must. Do not ever user 72 or anything less than 300 if you are going to print it. You can, but it will look really ugly. Or small if printed with 300dpi anyway. So, set it to 300 then continue to step 4!

Tip: Save the preset to speed up future designs.

Step 4

We’ll add guides to know where to and where not to place artwork and text. Start with the bleed area. The most precise way to add our guides is the following: View -> New Guide…

We need to enter the following numbers:

• Vertical 0.125 in (left)
• Horizontal 0.125 in (top)
• Vertical 3.625 in (right)
• Horizontal 2.125 in (bottom)

I just calculated simply like 3.75-0.125=3.625 etc… You’ll see that anything you place outside this newly formed area will be most likely cut.

Step 5

Before we can work on the actual design there is one more thing to do. To mark the no text area. It’s again a 0.125" space on each side.

So add these too:

• Vertical 0.25 in (left)
• Horizontal 0.25 in (top)
• Vertical 3.5 in (right)
• Horizontal 2 in (bottom)

These are just for you, the print doesn’t really need guides. They need a card which is designed with these things in mind, (this is basicaly padding).

Step 6

The previous steps included everything you need to get started. Follow the rest and you’ll learn a bit more about this! I’d start with a gradient. To do that add a gradient adjustment layer. Click on the 4th icon at the bottom of the layers window, then choose "Gradient…" from the menu. Set it from the color #3a5790 -> #0e2138.

It’s a dark blue gradient. Check Dither to avoid ugly stripes. Angle it by -45, and it will be a linear gradient.

Step 7

In this step we’ll add some texture to the gradient so it will look much better. Create a new layer then go Filters -> Render -> Clouds. Make sure your colors are black and white. If not just click the little black and white icon next to them on the main toolbar. Set this layer’s composition mode to Hard light. Then Image -> Adjustments -> Brightness/Contrast. Check the legacy box, then lower contrast to -80. Voila.

Step 8

Now get a nice font from dafont.com. I’ll use the Harabara.

Step 9

Add a text area for the name, and type in Johnathan Doe. Make it 120 pixels big. Align to the right. Place it near the no text guide.

Step 10

Add 2 more text areas. One for the title and another for the number. Title is 75px, the number is 84px big in my case. The number ends up as wide as the title. The point is that they form a text block this way.

Step 11

Add 2 more text areas again. One for the email-website combo and an other one for the multi-line address. Align left the address, right the other. Use 30px font size. Try to position them nicely, so put them always the same distance from the no text guides. I move them with 2 presses of the shift+arrow combination when working at the zoom of 66%. (These pictures are at 50%.)

Step 12

Here you can add a custom artwork or logo. Let’s place a fancy line there. We’ll make a basic wavy thing out of it soon. Select the Polygonal Lasso (Shift+L twice) and on a new layer draw a line shape with a little bit more width on the left than right. Then fill it with white (Paint Bucket – hot-key: G).

Step 13

Add an outer glow layer style (double click on the line layer) with these settings: vivid light mode, 100% opacity, white color, softer technique, 0% spread, 40px size, 20% range. It should look like a light-saber.

Step 14

Go to Filter -> Liquify and choose the Bloat tool. Be extra careful with this, we only want a thin wavy line with changing width. I don’t know about you but I don’t like the pen tool, for this effect liquify is very natural and good. Don’t make the line too wide because the edges will become jagged and will look like an up-scaled drawing. So let’s just make it wavy, with a tiny variation in width. If you are not satisfied with the result you can liquify again and/or paint over it with a 10% opacity white brush.

Step 15

Almost at the end, but our text areas need a little effect. A drop shadow will do the trick, add a 30% opacity shadow in the layer style of one of the text layers. Make the shadow color rich black. Manually type 100% into the C, M, Y, K fields in the color chooser. This is important whenever you use black in CMYK. If you use 100% K and others 0% it will still look black on the monitor but in print it will look dark grey…

Step 16

Right click on the layer you’ve just added the layer style to and copy layer style. Select the rest of the text layers, right click then paste layer style. Voila.

Step 17 – Optional…Sort Of

Important note: ONLY do this if you forgot to set to CMYK in the beginning! I’ve included this tip because it can happen to anyone, and here is the solution.

I have to admit, on my first attempt at creating a card I forgot to set the color mode to CMYK. If it happens don’t panic. You can change it now, but it’s not as straightforward as you think. First try it out, from the Image -> Mode -> CMYK Color. It looks totally bad isn’t it? I mean, it has nothing to do with what we’ve been doing. You can flatten the whole image then do the conversion so it’ll look good but you can’t edit the layers after that. And flattening is truly a no-no!
Thanks to smart objects we can skip this problem very nicely. Select all your layers (you can leave out the text layers), and convert them together to a smart object: right click menu -> Convert to Smart Object. Then do the color mode change as mentioned above. Dialogs will appear, but you are not going to rasterize, merge, nor choose a different profile. If you need any more editing done, you can do so in the smart object (double click on it), which is still in RGB mode, haha!

Step 18

If you are planning on uploading the card to a stock graphics market, or just show it around on the net, create a slice along the bleed area guides. Then use File -> Save for Web & Devices. And create color variations (this is mostly a combination of adjustment layers such as hue/saturation placed above the background but below the wave artwork).

Step 19

You’ve reached the end of this tutorial. Thank you for reading, I hope it was useful, and I wish you luck in your future designs. Here is our finished card without the bleed area. I did a warm version too just for fun. I’d appreciate if you would take a look at my first business card here. Leave a comment below with your thoughts and/or tips.