Welcome everyone to our guide on how to make a
business card. Throughout the following pages, we'd like
to show you how you can design a business card and manage
to get it printed by a business card printing service.
This introduction covers some preparation steps and tips
we think you should know upfront.
What will you do? You will start with deciding on and
preparing the content for your business card. After that
you will learn about manufacturing options to clarify
datails necessary for your design. Next comes the first
design step in which you will explore design ideas and
develop a prototype with desktop publishing
software. With your design in mind you will then go on and
choose a business card printing service. Printing services
provide specific technical requirements on how to submit
your business card design. You will use these technical
requirements in the second design step in which you will
prepare your print file[s].
The final step is to upload your print file[s] to a
printing service to ultimately submit a print order.
Here are the six steps of the project in short form:
1, Prepare Business Card Content
2, Learn About Manufacturing Options
3, Design Your Business Card
4, Choose a Business Card Printing Service
5, Create the Business Card Print File[s]
6, Submit a Business Card Print Order
The desired outcome of your efforts is a box with well-designed
business cards which serve their purpose and help you
achieve your business objectives.
Prerequisites
Before you can make a business card you have to fulfill two
prerequisites. The first prerequisite is having a logo. Your
logo is the most significant visual design element of your
brand. Making a logo is not part of this guide.
The second prerequisite is having graphic design software. We
recommend that you download and install software before
you begin with a project. This way you won't get
interrupted later on. We are going to use the open source
desktop publishing software
Scribus 1.6.4 [stable release].
Workspace Tips
Without going into detail on how to professionally setup a
graphic design workspace, we just want to
mention three simple, basic workspace tips everyone can
put into practice to achieve a better work result.
The first one is to clean your display. Dust accumulates
slowly on your display and gradually worsens your vision
over time. Therefore, it may happen that you do not
notice as strong a dust layer on your display and don't
think about cleaning it. Especially when you are excited
about getting started with your project.
The second tip is to design during daytime without
artificial light. Non-professional artificial light sources
often have a yellow tint that influences your color
perception, which you want to avoid.
The third and final workspace tip is to reduce your
display's brightness. Graphics can look much brighter on a
computer screen than they can when printed. As a simplified
example this could mean that your dispaly's brightness
setting usually is at 80%, but a closer representation of a
printed result is at a brightness setting of 53%. We do not
recommend to omit tip number three to compensate for the
effects described in tip number one.
Things to Avoid
There are two things you should avoid when making a business
card. One is to view your business card design in isolation,
as if it was solely about your business card. Instead, from a
branding perspective the design should be transferable to
other marketing materials, e.g. your letterhead. Your design
choices have an impact on the ability to remember your brand.
The more consistent the brand impressions are for your
customers, the better they can remember your brand. And after
all, brand recognition is an important goal in marketing.
The other thing to avoid when making a business card is
sacrificing quality for pennies. Nobody likes to waste money, but
selecting the cheapest option is probably not a good idea. Among
other things, marketing material is made to communicate
attributes of a brand, product, or service. Communicating
low quality probably doesn't convince potential customers
to do business with you. Moreover, potential customers could
get the impression that you are desperate for money. That in
turn could weaken your position in price negotiations. In
both cases you are probably losing more money than if having
spent more for better quality.
Collect Real Life Examples
Here is one final tip before we actually begin. Collect some
real life business card examples. Maybe three to ten.
Preferably from the same or similar industries. We got the
impression that examples online are either overdesigned or
generic. With a real life example, you can analyze a design
which at least one person thought is a good choice for their
business. Example works serve two purposes. The first is
being an inspiration. Seeing what others have done helps
you getting started. The second purpose is being a
comparison tool for your own work. Some details of your work
only pop out when comparing it to other works.
Conclusion
That concludes the introduction of our guide on how to make
a business card. You can now move on to the first realization
step: Prepare business card content.
