How to Design Your Business Card

Designing your business card is the core task for making your business card. This page goes through the design process and shows how to use Scribus desktop publishing software. The goal of this page is to have a design available that is ready to be packaged for production. The previous page of our guide is about the manufacturing options for your business card.

Graphic Design Work Process

To help you get into the mindset of graphic design work, we would like to take a few moments to talk about the graphic design work process. Design work needs a different type of work process than the majority of everyday tasks. The majority of everyday tasks can be accomplished by following a linear/sequential process. These processes consist of a fixed sequence, with fixed steps to produce a predetermined result. In contrast, design work is accomplished with an iterative/cyclical work process. These processes consist of a set of steps that are repeated over and over, and which produce a different result every time.

What does the set of steps for the design work process consist of? We define the following steps for one cycle within the design work process: "generate ideas", "pursue ideas", "assess results" and "decide on results".

Generating ideas means: To try to find answers to the question about "what can you do to achieve a pleasing result"? For example, where to place an item and how to form its appearance, what styles to apply? Tip: The more ideas you generate the higher the chances of generating a great idea. Tip: To minimize the work of a new idea, try to evaluate it before you pursue it.

Pursuing an idea means: To act on it, doing practical work, applying the opportunities of the craft and your tools.

Assessing results means: To assess/evaluate the change of your design compared to the previous state. For example, you would look at your creation and ask yourself, what you think of this new state. Tip: Don't assess too early/too often because you could fall into a microoptimization trap. Tip: Assess with final output in mind: if your final workpiece is printed, then don't just evaluate its appearance on screen.

Deciding on results means: To decide on how to act on your result assessment. You have three basic options: "keep the result and move on", "refine the result by doing another work cycle" and "discard the result and start over".

Why would you choose one over another? Decide on keeping the result if you like it and don't think you can make a noteable improvement with reasonable effort. In practice you could experience that a result is not better compared to the previous state. Decide on refining your result if you think you can make a notable and required improvement with reasonable effort. Don't do more work than required. Don't fall into the perfection trap. Decide on discarding your result if you don't like it and don't think you can change that with reasonable effort.

Design Principles

Design Principles help you make a composition aesthetically pleasing.

1. Emphasis [Focal Point; Message]
2. Hierarchy [Visual Roadmap]
3. Alignment and Grid
4. Proximity and Grouping
5. Contrast
6. Proportion
7. Balance [elements; visual weight]
8. Repetition
9. White Space [doesn't have to be white...]
10. Movement
11. Rhythm
12. Unity vs. Variety
13. Pattern
14. Color Harmony
15. Depth

Main Section

From the introduction, we now move on to the main section of this page. We are going to use the desktop publishing software Scribus 1.6.4 [stable release] for this project. If you haven't installed Scribus yet, then now is the time to do so.

Configure Scribus Application Preferences

After you have launched Scribus, we first want to look at some important application preferences. To open the preferences window we click "File" and then "Preferences..." in the menu bar.

There are preferences that are only available at the application level, while other preferences are simply default values that can be overwritten at the document level. The first two preferences we look at are only available at the application level.

The user interface elements of Scribus are rather small. Likely in order to maximize the visible document area. If you have a hard time reading the menu lables, you can increase their font size in the "User Interface" preferences window.

The second preferences window we look at is the "Paths" window. In particular, we are interested in the "Color Profiles" path. This is the file structure path to a folder where you can store icc color profiles that you want to use in a Scribus project but which you don't want to install on your system.

We need icc profiles to convert RGB screen colors to CMYK print colors as accurately as possible. For example, we use the "GRACoL 2006 Coated" profile as our standard CMYK profile. You can download the "GRACoL2006_Coated1v2.icc" file from the International Color Consortium's website.

Next comes the "Fonts" preferences window. There you can select the "Additional Paths" tab, where you can "Add..." a file structure path to font file directories. Just like with icc color profiles, you only need to enter the path of directories with fonts you don't want to install on your system.

"Color Management" is another important preferences window. In the screenshot below you can see how we configured it for us. We turn on all options in the "Document Options" section. There is one option that is called "Mark Colors out of Gamut". When this option is turned on, out of gamut colors are displayed as bright green pixels.

Now we are going to look at two preference windows regarding the PDF file generation. We start with the "Preflight Verifier" preferences window. There we want to select our standard print PDF file format from the "Output Profile" drop down. We also set the "Minimum Resolution" to 300 dpi. What does preflight mean? One definition could be: To perform a series of tests to verify the readyness to generate a standard compliant PDF file from our Scribus document.

Finally we move on to the "PDF Export" preferences. We select the "File Options" tab and also select the "PDF/X-1a:2001" PDF file standard from the "Compatibility" drop down.

Great! You can now click on "OK" at the bottom right of the preferences window to confirm all changes and to close the window.

Create a New Scribus Document with Margins and Bleeds

Now that we have finished setting application preferences, we can create the document for our business card. For this we click "File" and then "New..." in the menu bar.

This opens the "New Document" window in which we can set the attributes for our business card document. The "Width" and the "Height" values represent the final size of the business card. We want a standard size business card, therefore we enter the values 3.5" x 2.0". For the margins and bleeds we enter standard industry values of 0.125" for now. We can adapt these later on, before we generate PDF files for a specific printing service. We set the number of pages to two, so that we can work on the frontside and backside in one document.

Once you confirmed your settings by clicking on the "OK" button, Scribus displays the new document. The blue line confines the safe area, the red line represents your document dimensions.

What is the safe area? It's the area a printing service guarantees no content will be cut off during the cutting process. The cutting accuracy is a major quality feature of a printing service. The cutting may be accurate but it's not guaranteed. Cutting lines could be displaced or askew.

What is the bleed area? In the screenshot it's the area outside of the red line. If you have artwork that goes all the way to the edge, then you should expand your artwork to also cover the bleed area. This is supposed to compensate for any cutting inaccuracies.

To center and zoom our document we use the relevant buttons in the status bar.

Just a quick side note about preferences at the document level: From the project perspective there is no need to change any preferences at the document level. We are good with the changes we have made at the application level. In case you want to change any preferences at the document level, you can do this by clicking on "File" and then "Document Setup..." in the menu bar.

We conclude the step of creating the new document with saving the document with a new file name.

Create Color Data Objects [Swatches]

When you work with graphics software, color in general is only an attribute you assign to shapes and text. But when you work with desktop publishing software, you have to create data objects for all colors you want to use in your document. This way more information than simple color values can be stored, which can be important for printing.

We usually seek to add colors as the first step after having created a new document. For this we click "Edit" and then "Colors and Fills..." in the menu bar.

When the "Colors and Fills" window opens you can see an example color set. You can remove the colors of the example set by clicking on the button "Remove Unused".

Three colors can't be deleted. Before you can add a new color you might have to activate "Solid Colors" again.

Then you can click the "Add" button to add a new color data object.

This opens the "Edit Color" window. Here you can see several input fields to define a new color. Notice how out of gamut colors are displayed as bright green pixels in the color map and in the color model bars. We want to begin with adding our brand orange color. Our brand orange is defined as an sRGB color with the values R:240, G:139 and B:39. To enter these values we have to select the "RGB" option from the "Color Model" drop down.

The color fields indicate that our sRGB color is in gamut of our target color space (GRACoL).

We could convert our RGB color into CMYK color right away. This would calculate the CMYK values of our brand orange for the "GRACoL 2006 Coated" color space.

But we stay more flexible if we convert colors as one of the last steps before generating PDF files. Therefore we leave it as RGB color for now and click "OK" to add the color to the list. We repeat this process for all colors we want to add and after that our "Colors and Fills" window looks like this:

We click on "OK" again to conclude the step of adding colors to our document.

Insert Essential Contact Information Content

Before we start adding content to our document we'd like to show you how we arranged the necessary panel menu windows. You can add panel menu windows by clicking on "Windows" and then on the desired window label in the menu bar.

All right, let's start adding content. We want to do this in the same order as we discussed it on our page "Prepare Business Card Content". So we start with essential contact information content. We split this content into three groups: 1, full name and job title; 2, means of contact; 3, organization data.

We want to put this content in its own layer and so we add a new layer by clicking on the "+" button in the "Layers" panel.

While we are at it, we rename "New Layer 1" into "Essential Contact Information Content" by first double-clicking on the name field.

To add the first text group, we first click on the "Text Frame (T)" tool button in the tool bar to activate it.

The mouse cursor now indicates the selected tool. Then we create a text frame on the canvas by holding down the left mouse button and draging the mouse to the right and the bottom.

After we release the mouse button the text frame is outlined in red. Furthermore, the "Text Properties" panel is now activated. We edited several attributes there: We changed the font family to "Lato", the font size to "10.00 pt", the line spacing to "12.00 pt" and the text color to "Text Color Main (26)".

Note that text properties can be set for a text frame and text elements inside a text frame separately. We can write the full name and job title into the text frame by first double-clicking on it.

Text properties settings are not preserved for the next text frame. You always start with the settings of the default style. For bigger projects you could edit the default style or create new styles. In our case, we just copy and paste the first text frame if we want to create a new one.

So next we create the text frames for the means of contact group and organization data group.

The outlines of the text frames seem distracting. We can turn this feature off by clicking on "View" and then "Document" and then "Show Frames" in the menu bar.

Now we can experiment with positioning the texts. There are four options for positioning elements in Scribus: With your mouse, with your keyboard's arrow keys, with the input fields in the [object] "Properties" panel menu and with the features of the "Align and Distribute" panel menu. For text in particular, there is the additional option to use the alignment features in the text properties panel menu.

Here are a few suggestions on how you could arrange the three text groups.

1, One column [1, 2, 3]

2, One column [1, 3, 2]

3, Two columns [1 + 2, 3]

4, Two columns [1, 2 + 3]

5, Frontside [1, 2], backside [3]

We decided to go with option five. This means text block three will share the available space with optional content.

Next we changed the appearance of the first text frame. We set "Align Text Center" for the whole text frame and changed font style and font size only for the first line.

Further text adjustments are applied later on with regard to other elements. To conclude this section we rename our text frame elements to better recognize them in the outline window.

Insert Essential Brand Related Content

After we added essential contact information content, we want to add essential brand related content. This consists of our logo and our tagline. Our logo is made of vector graphics which we created with Inkscape. This means we are going to import a vector graphics image into Scribus.

Before we import image files into Scribus we try to prepare them in their respective graphics application as well as possible. Our goal is that positioning will be the only operation we have to perform in Scribus with these images. This means we try to solve any quality or size issues before we import them. This may not always be possible or practical.

We performed some operations in Inkscape to prepare our logo for import. These might all not be necessary but if you encounter any problems you will have starting points to solve them.

Furthermore, we decided early on that we want to frequently show our logo and tagline together and therefore prepared a logo-tagline image for convenience.

We begin importing the image file with creating a new layer and naming it "Essential Brand Related Content". Then we want to move text groups one and two to make some space for the image. But if you want to select elements that are on a different layer than the active one, you first need to turn on the "Select Objects on Layer" feature in the "Layers" panel menu.

After moving the text frames we click "File" and then "Import" and then "Get Vector File..." which opens the "Open" file dialog.

We select the file we want to import and click on "OK". The mouse cursor now indicates the import function status.

We move the mouse cursor roughly to the position where we think the top left corner of the image should be and place the image with a single click.

If your vector graphics image had any colors not found in the current color palette, they would be added to the set upon import.

We have established a general rule that we want to position our logo at the top center of workpieces. Therefore, we move it there but we try to center it by its visual weight. The blue element of the logo is heavier than the orange element and so we move it slightly to the right.

From time to time you may want to look at the canvas without any outlines or guides. There is a "Preview Mode" for this which you can turn on by clicking on the respective button in the tool bar.

At the moment this displays a warning message. If this message annoys you, turn off the "Mark Colors out of Gamut" feature in the "Color Management" preferences window of the document.

In preview mode the canvas currently looks as follows:

If you wanted to change the size of your image but preserve the width-to-height ratio, you can hold the CTRL key while dragging a corner handle of your image with your mouse.

To conclude this section we rename our image element which you can see in the "Outline" panel menu.

Insert Optional Content

The next step is to add optional content if you wanted to include any. We create a new layer and name it "Optional Content".

What optional content did we think of? We thought we could add value by providing a mini-guide that is inspirational and fun. Here is the text of our mini-guide:

"Do you want to sketch a new business card?

Use this one as a stencil to draw the shape of an empty business card on paper. Draw two shapes next to each other to sketch frontside and backside together.

Visit our website for a free guide on how to make a business card yourself."

To add this text we copy and paste an existing text frame, place it in the backside page and enter the text.

The text is too big for the available space, so we start looking for ways to make it fit. First we try to reduce the font size to 9.00 pt and rearrange some text.

This is better but the content still doesn't fit. One thing you can discover in the screenshot is that there are three lines of text that barely cover half of their line. This led to the idea to check out what happens if we changed the content's layout orientation from landscape to portrait.

We can rotate elements with the "Rotation" input field in the "Properties" panel menu.

Then we resize and reposition the text frames.

This looks promising but we do three more tweaks. Reduce the font size to 8.80 pt, reduce line spacing to 10.80 pt and change the font style to bold for the heading and the company name.

To conclude this section, we rename the new text frame and save the changes.

Add Complementary Graphics

At the moment the design has lots of text and only little graphics. It seems boring. Something is missing. To make the design more interesting we want to add more graphics. We think of them as complementary graphics. They complement the current composition [lots of text] and the logo as the only graphic.

We want to work with rectangles [ ] because the most popular marketing materials are rectangular. So we sketched a few ideas but they all took up too much space. Then we thought that bars are thin rectangles and that repetition is our friend. So to complement the logo we want to create two bars of different sizes with the logo colors. We place these at the bottom of the pages and center them because our logo is centered. If we had put our logo on the left or right, the complementary graphics would mainly cover the opposite corner.

We start with adding a new layer and naming it "Complementary Graphics". Then we activate the "[Rectangle] Shape (S)" tool in the toolbar.

We draw a rectangle on the canvas and edit its attributes in the "Properties" panel menu. We change the name, x-pos, y-pos, width, height, fill color and unset stroke color.

And then repeat it for the other rectangles.

NOTE that this type of design choice is usually recommended against. If your business card is cut slightly skewed, then these kind of shapes make it even more visible. On the other hand we have seen many perfectly cut business cards and so we want to take the risk.

This time we gave elements a new name immediately. So to conclude this section, we only have to save the changes.

Finishing the Design

Now that we are about to finish our design, we would like to explore the question of how we could increase our chances that somebody actually contacts us. After all, this is the main response we hope to get from people to whom we give our business card. For this purpose we want to include a message that resonates with recipients as well as a call to action.

A positive and inviting message could simply be:
"How can I help you today?"

As for the call to action, we thought of renaming the means of contact labels, e.g. from "Mobile" to "Call". We want to present only two action options and so we delete the "Phone: [...]" text line. This also frees up much-needed space. Here is what the design looks like now:

Now you can understand why we mentioned earlier that we are not going to use icons instead of labels for our means of contact.

We did a few more adjustments to finish our design:

This is our preliminary design:

Conclusion

Let's now summarize this page. In the introduction we first discussed the cyclical nature of a design process compared to the sequential nature of processes for most everyday tasks.

Next we listed general graphic design principles to guide your design work.

We started the main section with setting up our digital design workspace. This included creating a new Scribus document.

We then started adding content in the same order as discussed on our page "Prepare Business Card Content". We added essential contact information content, essential brand related content and optional content. Each time we positioned and adjusted the created elements to gradually build up the design.

The next step was concerned with improving the design aesthetics by adding complementary graphics.

In the final design phase we crafted a message and a call to action to increase our chance of getting the desired response from people to whom we give our business card.

Finally, we looked for elements that didn't seem right yet and applied final adjustments.

Before you can turn your design into print files, you need to collect vendor specific technical requirements. Therefore, your next step is to choose a business card printing service [coming soon].