Printers for business cards: what to send a local shop
How to choose between a home printer, a local print shop and an online press, what to ask each one, and the file that makes the job easy.
Read it →You can print business cards at home and have them look bought if you get three things right: heavy paper, a sheet laid out with proper guides, and a straight cut. Most home printed cards fail on the cut.
Start with the sheet, not the card
The whole method follows, ending with the point at which it is worth stopping and paying a printer instead.
Printing one card per page wastes paper and gives you nothing to cut against. The print at home sheet lays ten copies of your card on one page with cutting guides. A4 fits ten of every size; US Letter fits ten of the US size, so the paper choice appears beside the button with the size that needs it.
Download that sheet from the print design screen; it costs nothing. If you have not made a design yet, the free card maker will give you one in a few minutes. Or start from one of our trade pages: each has a ready starter sheet of ten cards filled in for that trade, to print and test your cutting before you add your own details.
Buy the right paper
This is where home printed cards are won or lost. Ordinary printer paper at 80 gsm feels like a receipt and will be thrown away.
- 250 to 300 gsm card stock is the sensible floor. It feels like a card.
- Matte holds ink better on a home printer than gloss, which can smear and often is not designed for inkjet at all.
- Check your printer's maximum paper weight before buying a ream. Many home printers jam above 220 gsm, and the manual says which tray, usually the rear or manual feed, takes the heaviest stock.
If your printer cannot take card stock, print on the heaviest paper it will take and glue two sheets back to back with a spray adhesive. It sounds crude and the result is better than a flimsy single sheet.
The printer settings that matter
Turn off Fit to page. Any scaling makes your 85 by 55 mm card a slightly different size, and then the guides no longer match the cut.
Print at 100 per cent, actual size. Measure the first sheet with a ruler before printing nine more.
Choose the highest quality setting and the correct paper type. Selecting Card Stock or Heavy tells the printer to slow down and lay more ink.
Print one test sheet on ordinary paper. Hold it up to the light against a ruler. Fix the scaling before you spend the card stock.
Cutting is the whole job
A pair of scissors will not do it. The eye reads a wobbly edge instantly, even when it cannot say why the card looks wrong.
Best: a guillotine or a rotary trimmer. Cut all ten sheets in the same order, working from one guide to the next, and never move the paper between two cuts of the same line.
Acceptable: a steel ruler and a craft knife on a cutting mat. Three light passes beat one heavy one. A heavy pass drags the blade and curves the line.
Round corners only if you have a corner punch. Rounded corners cut by hand look homemade in a way nothing else does.
Cut a single test card first and put it in your wallet for an hour. If it comes out looking bent and scruffy, your paper is too light.
The two margins that decide everything
Every size here is drawn with 3 mm of bleed and a 3 mm safe area. Bleed is the extra artwork past the cut line, so a millimetre of drift does not leave a white sliver on the edge. The safe area is 3 mm inside the line: keep words and logos inside it and nothing important is trimmed.
On a home cut, your drift is larger than a commercial guillotine's, so treat the safe area as a hard rule rather than a suggestion. The printable business cards guide goes through both margins with pictures.
The part no printer can add
Twenty home printed cards for an event this week will do their job on the day. The trouble is the week after, when your card is one of forty in somebody's bag. Put your code on the sheet and the card behind it keeps working: people who save it can get card notifications from you, and a pass in Apple Wallet can show a location notification near a place you choose, such as the venue on the second day. Pro is $0.99 a month; location alerts are an add-on to it.
When to stop and use a printer
Home printing suits a batch of twenty for an event this week, a test of a new design before committing, and one off cards for a side project.
Go to a printer when you need a hundred or more, when the design has a solid colour across the whole card, since home printers band badly on large flat areas, when you want a soft touch or thick stock finish, or when the cards represent a company rather than a person.
We also print cards to order and send them to any country, in eight sizes, with the delivery charge on the page before you pay. Either way the design and every download stay yours. Before any of it, make your free card so the code on your sheet has a card to open.
Questions people ask
What file should I print from?
The print at home sheet for a home printer. Send a printer the PDF instead: it is the card at its real size with bleed and crop marks, and it carries the letter shapes rather than a font name, so the printer never has to own the lettering.
Why does my card come out slightly small?
Almost always Fit to page or Shrink to fit in the print dialogue. Set the scale to 100 per cent and print again.
Can I print double sided at home?
Yes, but line the two faces up on a test sheet first. Home printers pull the second pass a millimetre or two out, which is why a back face with a border is a bad idea and a back face with a centred code is a good one.
How many can I get out of one sheet?
Ten, on A4 at any of the four sizes, or on US Letter at the US size.