Business card sizes in mm and inches, country by country
The four sizes that cover most of the world, what each one is in millimetres, inches and pixels, and how to pick the right one for your cards.
Read it →Business card bleed is 3 mm of artwork carried past the cut line, and the safe area is 3 mm inside it. The blade drifts a little on every stack, so bleed stops a white edge showing and the safe area stops it clipping your phone number.
What the guillotine actually does
A press prints many cards on one large sheet, and the sheet is cut in a stack. The blade is accurate to a fraction of a millimetre, and the paper itself shifts a little under the clamp. Over a stack of several hundred, the first card and the last card are not cut in exactly the same place.
Nobody is being careless. It is how cutting paper works, and both margins are the trade's answer to it. Between them they are the difference between a good print run of five hundred cards and a wasted one.
Bleed, in one paragraph
Bleed is the extra artwork past the cut line. If your card has a coloured background, a photograph or a shape touching any edge, that artwork must continue 3 mm beyond where the card will be cut. Then a half millimetre of drift cuts into the extra, and the edge is still solid colour.
If your card is white to the edges, bleed changes nothing for you. The moment any colour touches an edge, it matters.
The safe area, in one paragraph
The safe area is 3 mm inside the cut line. Everything that has to survive, words, logos, a QR code, goes inside it. Anything nearer the edge is at the mercy of the same drift, and a trimmed phone number is a reprint.
In practice, treat it as a design rule rather than a technical one. Words sitting 3 mm from an edge look cramped anyway; giving them 5 mm looks deliberate and is safer.
Crop marks, the third piece
Crop marks are the small lines outside the artwork telling the press where to cut. Without them, the printer is inferring your intended trim, and an inference plus a drift is exactly the failure both margins exist to prevent. The print PDF you download carries them.
Five mistakes that cost a print run
A border round the whole card. A 2 mm border is the cruellest design on a press, because drift makes it thick on one side and thin on the other. If you want a border, make it thick enough that a millimetre does not read.
A background that stops at the cut line. The commonest fault of all. It produces a white hairline on one or two edges of most of the batch.
Words at 1 mm from the edge. They look modern on a screen and get shaved on paper.
A back face designed to line up with the front. Home and digital presses pull the second pass a little out. A centred element on the back is safe; an element that has to align with something on the front is not.
Forgetting a rounded corner eats the safe area. A rounded corner takes a bite out of the very corner of the card, so text near it needs more room than near a square one.
How this is drawn for you
Every one of the four card sizes here is drawn with 3 mm of bleed and a 3 mm safe area, and both lines are shown on the canvas as you work. Pieces snap to the trim, to the safe area, to the centre lines and to each other. If a line of text sits too close to the edge, nudge it with the keyboard (Shift makes the steps finer) or type its position in millimetres into the inspector rather than aiming with a mouse.
Before anything is printed by us you see a proof: a picture of your card with the cut line and the safe area drawn over it, and one plain sentence for each check. That is the last moment where a wrong margin costs nothing. Each of our use cases shows a finished card for one trade with the bleed and the safe area already right, if you would rather start from one than from a blank page.
The reprint that margins cannot prevent
Get both margins right and the batch still has one weakness: the day your number changes, every card in the box is wrong. The code on the back fixes that, because it opens your digital card, which you edit as often as you like. Whoever opens it from the code and saves it to their phone can then get card notifications from you: a note after you met, or news that your number has changed. Pro is $0.99 a month and sends those notifications with a monthly allowance of credits, so everyone who saved your card hears the new details even while the old paper is still in their wallet.
If you bring artwork from somewhere else
The same two margins apply, and the export settings in most design tools have a bleed box you have to switch on. It is off by default, which is why so many files arrive without it.
Artwork brought here is checked: we read the file's real type from its bytes, accept PDF, PNG or JPEG up to fifty megabytes, check the shape against the card size for your country, and check the resolution where it prints. The guide to printable cards and the article on print files cover the rest of what a press asks for. The card behind the code is free to start: make your free card and put its code inside the safe area.
Questions people ask
How much bleed does a business card need?
Three millimetres on every side is the standard, and it is what every size here is drawn with. Some presses ask for more; ask yours if you are unsure.
Do I need bleed if my card is plain white?
No. Bleed only matters when artwork reaches an edge. The safe area still matters, because your words still have to survive the cut.
What happens if I send a file with no bleed?
A printer will either ask you for a new file or scale your artwork up slightly to create the bleed, which makes everything a fraction larger and moves your words closer to the edge. Neither is what you wanted.
Is the safe area the same on the back?
Yes, 3 mm on both faces. Front and Back is a control on the designer, and both faces are drawn with the same two lines.