There are many different ways to attack a business card design. Clean & corporate is always nice. But why not get a little wild? This tutorial will walk you through setting up a vertical grungy business card template, front to back and ready to print. It's important to set up our PSD file correctly right off the bat. The document needs to have an eighth inch bleed area, to ensure our background completely covers the card. So we'll add a quarter of an inch to the width and height of our template. Standard vertical business cards are 2"w x 3.5"h, so our canvas size should be 2.25"w x 3.75"h. Also, change the Resolution of the document to 300 pixels/inch to ensure high quality printing. Since the cards will be cut after printing, we need to set up guides as a reference to where our artwork needs to be. Click on your left ruler (if your rulers are not visible, press Ctrl + R) and drag a guide an eighth of an inch out. Do this again, this time to a quarter of an inch. Repeat this step for each side of the card.

The outside line represents the cut line. Anything printed beyond this line will be cut. The inside line is our safe area. Keep all of your text inside this area. Download the PSD template to see the blank business card template set up with guides.

Now that we have the file set up, we're ready to start on the background. We first need to source some stock grungy textures to play with. We'll get a few to layer and create a unique textured background, which you can download below.

Download grunge1.jpg | grunge2.jpg | grunge3.jpg

Place your textures on the canvas, and order them in the layers palette as shown. Also note the blending modes for the top 2 layers. You'll need to set these as Hard Light to blend all of the textures together. Our next order of business will be to add a decorative element to the background. This could even be a large version of your logo, or another design element you use with your brand. For this we'll use a nice vector floral design. Once you have it positioned above your background textures, change the blending mode to Overlay. This mode makes it looks as if our design has been sand blasted into the dirty wall. It's a little too subtle, so let's duplicate this layer to brighten it up a bit more.

Download floral.psd

Now position your logo at the top of the card, remembering to stay within the safe area.

Next, grab your type tool and start populating this card with your info. Make your name nice and big, and add your important contact information underneath -- don't forget your website URL too. It's a good idea to keep your smallest font size under 7pt to remain legible. For this example, I've used a clean san-serif font DIN, and set the name in 12pt, the title in 8pt, and the rest 7pt.

Let's add some dividers. Create a small white line beneath your text and extend it to the edge of the document. Blend it in by changing the opacity to 30%. Now duplicate this layer as many times as needed, position them between your text lines, and use your eraser tool with a low opacity to randomly fade out parts, creating a worn look. Finally, we'll add a translucent box behind the name and title. Pick a light color from our design, in this case #16a0aa, and create a rectangle from the edge of the canvas to just past the name filled with your color. Set the blending mode to Hard Light.

For the back of the card, I like to stay simple. A quick gradient and the logo centered is a nice touch. Once all is said and done, your final step is to convert the document color mode (Image > Mode) to CMYK. Why did we start off in RGB mode? CMYK doesn't offer as many colors to work with. Once your convert to CMYK, you'll notice your design becomes a bit duller. This design holds up well, but sometimes this color mode won't be as forgiving. To fix a muted design after converting to CMYK, increase the overall saturation and contrast -- you should be back in business.

Download grunge_card.psd (zip)

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Comments

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hcabbos

I've been designing for over 10 years now. I've had hundreds of projects sent to offset printers. And I agree usually text should be set in AI, Indesign, or Quark BUT... Photoshop in versions CS1-CS3 (maybe earlier) provide the Photoshop PDF format. If you save as such, your text will remain vector. The downside is that it creates much larger files than preparing text in the other programs but the point is that it's doable. For smaller jobs, I do this all the time. The end piece retains the sharp text characteristics you'll find from saving to PDF from Ill, Indesign, or Quark. As far as converting to CMYK screwing up the layer look achieved by layer modes, realize that some styles aren't easily achieved by starting out in CMYK. In those cases, I'll simply keep my working file in RGB. Once everything is good to go, I'll duplicate the file and flatten any layers that shift when converting to CMYK. I then convert to CMYK and adjust hue, saturation or anything else to bring it back to some resemblance of the RGB file.

NotImpressedWithTheBitching

What is all the bitching about? I have sent numerous business cards in this format to my printing company and the outcome was exactly as I have designed it. If you are a professional printing company, then go bitch to your employees and rather give accolades to this design.

mr.dottedline

nice business card but what is everyone talking about with the text

RGB to CMYK

you're wrong. Saturating the image won't fix it. Try downloading the zip file, then converting it to CMYK. The blend modes and everything change. You need to start in CMYK. SHAME!!!!

Greg

How did you get the final product, assuming the picture is of the actual cards? You can't send it to print as RGB, and if you convert your PSD file to CMYK, it gets fucked. oh, the other thing is that you never want to assume what the bleed is, always ask the printer. Typically it's 1/4, not 1/8... but it depends how many they lay out per cut. Nice design, but you know nothing about print.

NICE, but

I agree with the NO NO guy. Do the background and design in PS, but don't ever send text to a printer with Photoshop. Always send it to Illustrator or Indesign, and if you can't provide the font to the printer then "create outlines" in AI. He's a bit arrogant, but that's the biz. I too would fire someone if the sent in a print project through PS. Likewise, I would be horrified when the font came back from the printer all messed up.

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