Business Card Design Tips

Business cards remain essential tools for professionals. They provide an opportunity to network and take advantage of chance encounters where someone may be seeking the specific services offered. However, designing business cards can be challenging. Business owners turn to graphic designers for assistance in creating the perfect card that is both effective and of high quality, capable of leaving a lasting impression on recipients. We recognise the need for great designs and making the entire print process easier for our clients that's why at the Unique Enterprises we offer a super design service which goes hand in hand with all of our print services.
We have put these tips together to help and lend some advice in the world of business cards.

Do Adhere To Basic Design Principles

Business cards may be small but that doesn’t mean you should treat them differently to any other design work. Keep the design clean by aligning your elements with each other and leaving some negative space. Give extra weight to the more important aspects of the design and ensure there is sufficient contrast between the colours in the background and the text colour.
Below we have included an example of a business card design that clearly wasn’t thinking about the rule of contrast. While the name is legible, the contact information is not. If the font used thicker strokes, it might have been possible to read the contact information, however the combination of thin lettering and a dark colour makes it very hard to read.

Straight lines around the edges of business cards are generally advised against due to the unfortunate fact that printing is not 100% accurate. Minor movements within the mechanics can sometimes mean that printing becomes lopsided. Anything other than perfectly straight lines can probably get around this issue without anyone noticing but straight lines are harder to hide.

These days, business cards can be so much more than simply a flat, glossy piece of 85x55mm card. Using special finishes can give your clients’ cards some interesting textural detail, not to mention some added wow-factor!
Spot UV and foiling can both enhance certain elements of your design; foiling by giving a metallic sheen and spot UV by adding vibrancy to the colours beneath. You could also use letterpress printing, like in the example above, to emboss parts of your design. This guitar tutor uses spot UV to highlight their design very effectively. Check our Business Cards Designed For Window Cleaners for price and quality.

Special finishing techniques can make business cards stand out but they don’t always work. You need to think about how the effects of these finishes would interact with the rest of your design. For example, this business card for Bluebird Design uses letter press printing to emphasise their logo and to emphasise the detail in the background. On the front, the embossing works well but on the back it interferes with the text making it hard to read the company name.

Finding the right balance can be challenging when it comes to following this advice, as it is based on personal opinions. What may seem dull to one person could be seen as refined by another, making it difficult to determine what is truly balanced. The main point here is to avoid being generic. As a designer, we have the ability to create more than just a basic abstract design for a business card. It is important to incorporate elements that relate to our client's profession in the designs. For instance, the business card of an architect may appear very simplistic, yet it manages to avoid being boring or unoriginal.