Business card tutorial part 1

25 August 2010

Lately I was about to write something about business cards but I hadn’t good idea for tutorial. Then old friend of mine asked me to make one for him. He is very fussy and I had have to make a lot of cards. And thanks to this I have a lot of topics to cover now.

In next few parts (I don’t know how many exactly there will be) we will create a lot of various cards in many different programs (I hope so). Today I will show you how to make a simpliest typography-based card in photoshop. I’m gonna show you also how to prepare our file for printing.

Let’s start
In this tutorial I will not use vector graphic program (since photoshop isn’t one) and because of that our file needs some more attention. I will base on NextDayFlyers printing service. It really does matter which printing service you will choose because you have to take care about specific things they need that are gathered mainly in instructions. So some of my tips won’t be perfect in other printing services.

Step 0
First of all, try to find digital specs for your printing.

You don’t have to read the instructions for I will explain everything here (actually if you will choose some other printing service maybe you should). Just download the sample file.

Step 1
Open it up in photoshop. You have three layers there. If you want to unlock some layer just select it and click the lock icon on top of layers window. You can see some basic instructions in sample file. The green area is named bleed. Pure theory tells that this area will be cutted out from the card. But on the second hand my experience whispering that in fact you should connect it with rest of card. I was working in printing company and we have a lot of issues with bleeds. There were white lines on some sides of card because knifes was badly applied or just ink didn’t cover everything. So treat bleeds as if they are just part of card. The pink line with pink border shows safety zone. No text beyond this line. Actually it’s just for security purpose for it is very rare accident to cut sheet so bad, but… It happens. And I will stick to this.

Step 2
I moved my Instructions layer on the very top in layers order and lowered opacity. It is just for preview for you will have at last turn off this layer.
Go to Edit > Color Settings (SHIFT+CTRL+K) and apply U.S. Sheetfed Coated v2 as a CMYK color.

Now fill the whole document with #FEB605 color. Pick some light color (almost white) and make a radial gradient. Then change the blending mode to overlay. You can actually duplicate this layer for better effect.

As you can see I have added some border on bleeds. Don’t you do that (or make it less visible). It’s because I’m stick to oldschool rules. If you really want to determine your bleeds just place some small black crosses in the corners of bleed border like this.

Step 3

The less for front side is simple. Just pick a type tool, choose rich black color (C:70 M:50 Y:20 K:100) because pure black (C:0 M:0 Y:0 K:100) won’t be as black as it should and start typing. I have choosen ChunkFive font. Also in character settings I lowered down the tracking for all the letters.

The final result:

Actually you can add some layer style to the text like this:

We are adding this to make sure our color will end up correctly. There are a lot of such tricks but they are rather used in vector graphics. Now you can save the file. Name it a_filename.pdf and choose Photoshop pdf as a filetype. The reason of naming is important for we will use full color on the frontside (a prefix) and just grayscale on the backside (b prefix). While saving in Photoshop pdf from the very top choose option Press quality.

Step 4
We can use the same file for backside (just go to File > Save As and name it b_filename.pdf while saving). You can make some psd copies in case if you will want to change something later.
The reason of grayscale comes out from my friends economic aspect. It’s just cheaper. Firstly I made a full color backside…

…but later he asked me to change this.

It’s the same font, I just changed tracking to make it more readable.
Also I have added some shapes underneath the typo.

And he was happy with this card :) Mainly for it’s simplicity.
Back to the topic, if you want to use your own business card design you have to upload it while ordering. On nextdayflyers.com you have this option here:

Just make sure that a is for frontside and b for backside.
Thanks

❧