Today I‘m going to be looking into three technical things to consider when creating your own business cards: These are business cards sizes, specifications and bleed.  You can learn more of the non-technical aspects when you request our free guide: Business Cards Secrets by entering your name and email in the box provided to the right.

Creating Your Own Business Cards?

If you are are an entrepreneur, business professional or graphic designer looking to create business cards, here is how to get started:

It’s actually pretty easy to make professional-looking business cards using may programs you likely already have on your computer. You can start from scratch in some, including Microsoft Word,  OpenOffice Writer, OpenOffice Impress, Microsoft PowerPoint and others  You can also find customizable templates for many of these applications as well..

When creating your own business cards you need to be aware of three technical aspects: sizes, specifications and bleed.

Lets explore them:

As you learned in an earlier article there are many “standard” business card sizes across the world.  I’ll continue the rest of this article focusing on the standard in North America but you can learn about the others in business card dimensions.

To create your 3.5” by 2.0” card you may want add 1/8” all around it, meaning you will be working with a 3.75” x 2.25” specification.  The reason for this is to account for “bleed” in the design.  “Bleed” is simply extending the graphics on your cards by this additional 1/8” to remove the chance of a “white-space” border around any area of the card.  When the card is actually cut to 3.5” x 2.0” it will show the graphics going right to the edge and “bleeding” off the card: a nice professional look!

Now when working with your 3.75” x 2.25” specification you do not want to have anything like your logo, contact information or valuable marketing messages extending into the “bleed” area as they will not be on your finished card.  This helps avoid problems with slight variations with the cutting process as well.

Hope this helps,
Mark

P.S. Did you enjoy this post? I‘d love to know if these factors have effected your business cards and how you’ve used them. Please comment below . . .

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