How To Design A Professional Business Card

In the corporate world, not all businesses get equal opportunity when it comes to marketing and exposure.  Some companies become a household name right away while some needed years for consumers or clients to be familiar with them.  Business cards play a major role in introducing a company or a companies owner.Graphic Designer Tips Professional Business Card Design Tutorial

Business cards are an extension of your business. It gives a client all the necessary information they need before they decide on contacting you. The professionally designed business card can lead to a visit to your website and then a possible client.

You will have a much greater chance with a more professional design. The ideal business card should be designed in such a way that it will be able to express the personality of the company.

Here are some Graphic Design Tips on designing a professional business card.

Balanced and Consistent Typograhic Design

Text sizes make the design of business cards effective.  This element is important in its readability.  Small texts can give clients a hard time in reading the content while texts that are too large will look exaggerated.  The key in designing business cards is to achieve balance in the text size of the different content.

Fonts

You can use up to 2 fonts on your card. One can be a Serif and one can be a Sans-Serif. Using multiple fonts add character but be careful the fonts you choose and don’t use many variations of it (ie..bold, italic, light). Times New Roman and Helvetica Fonts go great together and I use them all of the time.Graphic Designer Tips Professional Business Card Design Tutorial

Include Vital Information

The content of business cards is how you will be able to introduce your company to prospective clients.  Make sure that it contains all these details:

  • Name of Company (including logo)
  • Your Name and Title
  • Email Address and Website Address
  • Office, Mobile and Fax numbers
  • List of a few services
  • Tagline or call to action

Create a Unique Layout

Adding images, logo elements and icons in a neat and professional way will greatly impact your audience. Keep the continuity with the colors, meaning if your logo is a forest green, then make sure some of your type is that same color. This causes elements to play off of each other instead of clash.

Don’t Cut Corners on Printing

Graphic Designer Tips Professional Business Card Design Tutorial
There is nothing I can’t stand more then when I see an awesome design printed in a terrible way. This can be due to paper stock, finishing choices or just a bad printing job. A standard business card size is 2” High by 3.5” Wide, but nowadays you see all types of interesting sizes with accents such as UV coating and rounded corners. Invest your money in high quality printing.

Now you are ready to take a crack at designing your own business or one for your client. In some cases it can be the difference in you getting that huge account. If you’d like some advice on your business cards please send them to [email protected].