How to print business cards at home and cut them straight
The paper, the printer settings and the cutting method that make home printed cards look bought rather than made, plus when to stop and use a printer.
Read it →A business card print file that comes back right first time has five things: the correct size, 3 mm of bleed, crop marks, letter shapes rather than font names, and enough resolution. Miss one and the printer rings you, and you both lose a day.
One: the right size for the country
Four sizes cover most of the world, and they are the four the designer here draws. 85 by 55 mm is normal across Europe, the Gulf and much of Asia. 3.5 by 2 inches is the United States and Canada. India uses 90 by 54 mm and Japan 91 by 55 mm.
Pick the size of the place the card will be handed out rather than the place it is printed. A card a few millimetres off the local size sits badly in a wallet, and people notice without knowing why.
Two: 3 mm of bleed
Bleed is artwork carried past the cut line. It exists because a guillotine cutting a stack of five hundred drifts by a fraction of a millimetre, and without bleed that drift shows up as a white sliver along one edge.
If your background is white, bleed changes nothing. If your card has any colour, photograph or shape touching an edge, that artwork must run 3 mm past the line. Our sizes are all drawn with bleed already, so a design made here carries it.
Three: crop marks
Crop marks are the small lines outside the artwork that tell the press where to cut. Without them a printer is guessing at your intended trim, and a guess plus a drift is a card with your job title clipped.
The print PDF you download carries crop marks. If you are sending artwork from somewhere else, ask for the export option that includes them.
Four: outlines, not font names
A PDF can store text in two ways: as characters that need the font installed, or as the shapes of those characters. The first is why a printer sometimes rings to say your card has come out in a different typeface.
Our download carries the shapes, so a printer never has to own the lettering. If you are exporting from another tool, look for Convert to outlines or Embed all fonts before you send anything.
Five: resolution at the size it prints
Three hundred dots per inch at the printed size is the standard. A logo that looks sharp on a screen at 900 pixels wide is 900 pixels across 85 mm on paper, which is far short.
If you bring your own artwork, we read the file's real type from its bytes rather than from its name, 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 actually prints. Three hundred and above passes, two hundred to two hundred and ninety nine gets a warning that it may look a little soft, and under two hundred is held, because it would come out blurry. A password locked PDF is held too, since nobody can open it to check. Colour is noted and never refused.
The proof is the last gate
Before anything is printed you see a proof: a picture of the card with the cut line and the safe area drawn over it, and one plain sentence for each check. You approve it in your own words, and the approved artwork stays on the order page afterwards.
Read the proof properly. It is the last moment where a wrong phone number costs nothing.
The safe area, which is not the same as bleed
Bleed is outside the cut line. The safe area is 3 mm inside it. Words and logos go inside the safe area; background goes out past the bleed. Keeping the two straight in your head is most of what separates a file a printer likes from one they do not.
Both are drawn for you on the canvas, and pieces snap to the trim, the centre lines and each other, so a file made here arrives with the two margins already respected.
What no print file can fix
A perfect file still prints a fixed phone number. When it changes, the box is wrong, however good the bleed was. That is why the QR code on the back matters: it opens your digital card, which you can edit at any time. People who save that card to their phone can get card notifications from you, and a pass in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet updates itself with your new details. Pro is $0.99 a month and covers the notifications; the wallet pass is an add-on. Each example card by trade is laid out to these same rules, so opening one in the maker gives you a file that already passes this list.
A short checklist before you send
- The size matches the country the cards are for.
- Any colour touching an edge runs 3 mm past the cut line.
- Crop marks are present.
- Lettering is outlined or embedded.
- Every picture is 300 dots per inch at its printed size.
- Both faces are in the file if the card is double sided.
Work through it once and the email to your printer is one line long. The guide to printable business cards has the same material with the measurements drawn, and the business card size tool converts between millimetres, inches and pixels. The easiest file to send is one made here, so make your free card and download it.
Questions people ask
Can I send a JPEG to a printer?
Some accept one. A PDF is better because it carries the size, the bleed and the crop marks as instructions rather than leaving them to be inferred from pixels.
What if my printer asks for a different bleed?
Ask what they want and say so. Three millimetres is the common standard; a few presses ask for more, and a card designed with 3 mm can usually be re-exported.
Does colour mode matter?
Presses work in CMYK and screens in RGB, so some colours shift. Colour is noted on the checks here and never refused. If an exact brand colour matters, ask your printer for a printed proof rather than trusting a screen.
Do I need a different file for the back?
No. Front and Back is a control on the designer, and a double sided card is printed from both faces in one file.