How To Create a Print Ready Business Card Design !!!

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Hello everyone this is Chris from Spoon Graphics back with another video tutorial. Today I'm
going to run through the process of designing a business card and talk about some of the
important things to consider when designing for print. How To Create a Print Ready Business Card Design !!! It's super important that you get things like bleed, color mode and resolution right when
you're creating your artwork, otherwise you might end up having your files rejected by
the printer, having to start again from scratch or even worse, receiving hundreds of prints
back that look nothing like your design!
So hopefully this guide will cover each step and ensure your print projects go smoothly.
Business cards are a common printed product that are fairly simple to design, but before
you start, make sure you receive specific artwork instructions from the printer you're
order business cards online going to use. Every company has their own preferences, so the settings I'm using in
this tutorial might not match up exactly to what your printer wants, but at least you'll
know what they're referring to when they say stuff like trim size and bleed size.
We're going to use a mix of Illustrator and Photoshop to make the most of each application's
strengths. The overall design will be composited in Illustrator, so we'll start there.
Create a new document and enter the dimensions of the business card in the artboard size
settings. A common business card size is 88x55mm, but again, make sure you check with your printer
first on their exact product specs. If you're in the US, you'll probably find the measurements
are in inches as opposed to millimeters.
The print firms I've used required 3mm bleed, so enter
press Tab to apply it to all sides. Bleed is basically some padding around the edge
of the design which is cut off during the printing process. It ensures that you don't
end up with tiny slithers of white paper along the edge of your prints if the machine isn't
lined up exactly.
We're designing for print, so select the CMYK color mode so we're working in Cyan, Magenta,
Yellow and Black inks as opposed to RGB light. Then most business cards are double sided,
so increase the number of artboards to
The main white area of the artboard is the finished business card size, also known as
the trim size. The red outline indicates the bleed area which any backgrounds will need
to extend to.
It's also wise to highlight a safe area within your document. This not only makes sure your
important elements like a name or logo aren't too close to the trim area that they risk
being chopped off, it also helps balance your design by applying some margin around the
edge.
The size of the safe zone is entirely up to you but
enough to look neat. You can highlight this area using guides, or draw a rectangle then
right click and select Make Guides.
I want a black background for my card design, so I'll grab the rectangle tool and draw a
shape that covers the entire bleed area, clearing out the stroke to leave just the fill colour.
A black background sounds simple enough, but there's a whole plethora of different blacks
in print design. If you move the colour picker to black you'll notice it's made up

in RGB, which means there's no light so it's as dark as you can get, but look over at the
CMYK values and they're all over the place, totalling at
to be printed when you consider the general limit is around
There's a basic 100% K black, which uses just the black ink from the standard CMYK process
colours. This is good for text because just using one ink out of the four CMYK colours
means you'll get the sharpest possible print, but when it's applied to a large area it can
look a bit washed out.
Rich black is the term used for mixes of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black that result in a
deeper black. A common one on 50, 40, 40,
four CMYK colours you set in your software and the amount of ink printed with each plate.
The trouble is, this particular colour mix uses all four plates, so it has a high risk
of misregistration which can cause fuzzy text, often seen on cheap newspaper prints.
A couple more common blacks are warm black and cool black, which mix
Cyan or Magenta. These two recipes only use two plates so it's much safer to use with
small text while still darkening the black. The difference between them, as their names
suggest, is one has more of a cooler blue tone, whereas the other has a warmer browny
red tone.
I'm going to use blue elsewhere in my design so I'll go with cool black to complement it.
Set up the colour manually by entering the relevant percentages in the CMYK values.
You can now begin building your business card design by bringing in a logo. Scale it to
size and align it to the safe zone guides.
There's no white ink in printing, unless it's a super specialist print. Giving something
a white fill in your software will translate to the other elements being knocked out to
allow the paper to show through.
When entering the text for your print design,
A business card is held up close so you can get away with generally smaller type, but
be careful if you're using elegant fonts with high contrast, there's a point where fine
lines become unprintable. The slab-serif Achille font I'm using is pretty robust so it can
handle
One thing to keep in mind when designing for print is the paper stock forms a large part
of the final design, which you don't get to see on screen. A lot of people try to add
gradients and drop shadows to make their designs more interesting, but these often just muddy
the final print. An area of flat colour might look boring on screen, but when its printed
you'll see the texture of the paper with a matte or glossy finish.
In my design I'm enclosing the main name and contact info in a white box, which needs extending
up to the bleed area. The text within this area needs to be black. I could keep using
cool black with 50% Cyan, but there's not really any point seeing as the text isn't
a large enough area to see the difference. All it does is risk misregistration, so instead
normal
For the other side of my business card design I'm going to leave the background white but
make use of a photo, so Photoshop comes into play here to use its strengths as an image
editor.
We need to recreate the business card document size in PSD format, so create a new document
and change the dimensions to millimeters. Photoshop doesn't have a separate bleed setting
so we need to calculate the total dimensions.
likewise 55+3+3=61mm. All print work needs to be
the resolution to
pixels per inch, then set the color mode to CMYK.
We can't see where the actual trim line is but setting the safe zone up using guides
will make sure the elements are laid out nicely. A quick way to do this is to set the size
of a marquee then snap the guides to it.
I want to have the logo and a tagline on this side of the card so I'll paste in the logo
graphic from Illustrator and type out the text with the relevant font. Usually it's
advised to add all your text in Illustrator because it's made in crisp vectors rather
than fuzzy pixels, but I'm going to overlay a photo, so Photoshop is the best option in
this scenario.
I've downloaded this space scene from Shutterstock. Pasting it into the document will automatically
convert it to CMYK and reformat it to 300ppi. This is a nice high resolution stock photo
so I've actually got to scale it down a lot. You don't want to try and use small images
from the web because they'll only be the size of a postage stamp in print terms, unless
you upscale them, which will make them look totally ugly.
The effect I'm looking for can be created using a layer mask. Filling it with black
hides the entire photo, then the areas I want visible can be selected and filled white.
Use Photoshop any time you're working with textures and images as part of your print
designs, then add text and logos in vector format over the top in Illustrator. When you're
done, save the file as a JPG using the normal Save As command so it retains the resolution
and colour mode.
Back in Illustrator this background can be placed onto the artboard for the other side
of the business card.
Before exporting the final print file it's wise to outline your fonts by pressing CMD+A
to Select All, then CMD+Shift+O to Create Outlines. This eliminates any chance of your
font not being picked up when it's opened on the printer's computer and defaulting to
something boring.
Go to File > Save As and select PDF. There's some options to add printer's marks but unless
your printer has specifically asked for them just leave them off. There's also a PDF setting
here that might be required.
This file now contains both business card sides in one print ready document. You can
give the file a quick check over by opening it in Adobe Acrobat.
Look for the Output Preview tool and toggle the various plates to see how the design will
be printed using the 4 process colours. In my design you can see Magenta and Yellow aren't
used at all on the first side and just black is used on the name area.
On the other side, the photo is made up of various percentages of all four colours.
If you're new to print design this video might have bombarded you with loads of information,
but hopefully it was a comprehensive guide to the things you need to consider when setting
up a print file. If you did find the video useful a thumbs up to help spread the word
would be really appreciated and if you want to stick around for more, remember to hit
that subscribe button. So thank you very much for watching and I'll catch you all later. *** ***