Business card bleed and the safe area, in plain terms
What bleed and the safe area are, why a guillotine makes both necessary, and the five mistakes that produce a box of cards with clipped words.
Read it →The standard business card size depends on where the card is handed over: 85 by 55 mm across Europe, the Gulf and much of Asia; 3.5 by 2 inches in the United States and Canada; 90 by 54 mm in India; and 91 by 55 mm in Japan.
The four sizes, in three units
Those four cover most of the world, and the designer here draws every one of them with 3 mm of bleed and a 3 mm safe area.
85 by 55 mm. 3.35 by 2.17 inches. At 300 dots per inch, 1004 by 650 pixels. With 3 mm of bleed on each side, 91 by 61 mm, or 1075 by 720 pixels.
3.5 by 2 inches. 88.9 by 50.8 mm. At 300 dots per inch, 1050 by 600 pixels. With bleed, 94.9 by 56.8 mm, or 1121 by 671 pixels.
90 by 54 mm. 3.54 by 2.13 inches. At 300 dots per inch, 1063 by 638 pixels. With bleed, 96 by 60 mm.
91 by 55 mm. 3.58 by 2.17 inches. At 300 dots per inch, 1075 by 650 pixels. With bleed, 97 by 61 mm.
The business card size tool converts between all three units, so you do not have to keep this page open while you work.
Which one to choose
Choose the size that is normal where the cards will be handed out, not where they are printed. A card a few millimetres off the local size sits oddly in a wallet and against other cards in a holder, and people notice it without being able to say why.
Two common cases:
- Printed in one country, used in another. Follow the destination. Cards printed in Mumbai for a Dubai office should be 85 by 55 mm.
- Used in several countries. Pick the size of the market where most cards are handed over, and accept that the rest is a rounding error nobody will comment on.
In the designer your country picks the normal one of the four for you, and you can change it. If we print the cards, the order page offers eight sizes to choose from, so an unusual size is a choice rather than a special request.
The one card with no size at all
A card on a phone has no millimetres to argue about, which is handy when you work across borders. Your digital card opens at your own address on any phone, and it can be added to Apple Wallet or Google Wallet as a pass that updates itself when your details change. Anyone who saves the card from its code can get card notifications from you afterwards, which is how a contact made in one country still hears from you in another. Pro costs $0.99 a month and includes a monthly allowance for those notifications.
Bleed and safe area, in one paragraph each
Bleed is 3 mm of artwork carried past the cut line. A guillotine cutting a stack drifts by a fraction of a millimetre, and without bleed that drift leaves a white sliver along an edge. If your card is white to the edge, bleed changes nothing; if any colour or photograph touches an edge, it must run out past the line.
The safe area is 3 mm inside the cut line. Words and logos go inside it. Anything outside risks being trimmed. Both are drawn for you on the canvas, so you are never guessing.
Pixels, and why 300 is the number
Screens are measured in pixels and presses in dots per inch, so the two only meet at a stated size. Three hundred dots per inch at the printed size is the standard: multiply the size in inches by 300 and you have the pixel count you need.
That is why a logo which looks crisp on a website is often unusable on a card. A 500 pixel wide logo across 85 mm of paper is about 150 dots per inch, which prints visibly soft. Artwork brought here is checked at the resolution where it actually prints: 300 and above passes, 200 to 299 gets a warning that it may look a little soft, and under 200 is held.
Landscape, portrait and square
The sizes above are landscape, which is what most people expect. A portrait card is the same rectangle turned, and it works well for a design built round a single tall photograph or a name.
Square cards are a different size again and cost more at most printers because they do not fit the standard press layout. Worth it for a design that genuinely needs it, wasteful otherwise. Every sample on our trade pages is drawn landscape at the US size, so you can judge a finished layout before you pick your own.
Rounded corners and thickness
Rounded corners are a finishing step, so they cost extra and they change the safe area slightly: keep words a little further from a rounded corner than from a square one.
Thickness is measured in gsm, and it is the first thing somebody judges once the size is right: aim for about 350, and anything under 300 reads as flimsy. The printable business cards guide covers paper and finishes, and the printing article covers doing it at home. Whatever size you settle on, make your free card first so the code on it has somewhere to go.
Questions people ask
What is the standard business card size?
85 by 55 mm in most of the world, 3.5 by 2 inches in the United States and Canada, 90 by 54 mm in India and 91 by 55 mm in Japan.
What size should the file be in pixels?
Multiply the card size in inches by 300. For 85 by 55 mm that is about 1004 by 650 pixels, or 1075 by 720 with bleed.
How much bleed do I need?
Three millimetres on every side is the common standard, and it is what every size here is drawn with. A few presses ask for more; ask yours if you are unsure.
Does the size change how much I can fit on?
Barely. The difference between the four sizes is a few millimetres. What decides how much fits is type size, and a card is read at arm's length by somebody who may not have their glasses on.