Color
Business Cards
HOW TO PRODUCE YOUR OWN COLOR BUSINESS CARDS
COLOR BUSINESS CARDS PRESENTATION
Hi this is Rich and today I wanted to share with you some business development ideas around the very simple but very common business card.
Here in the Denver market there are a few user groups and trade group meetings that I'll try and attend and I'm always surprised at some of the business cards that people hand me when I make their acquaintance, they literally look like they just came out of a dot-matrix printer and cut out with scissors, some real low grade stuff. And in this day and age, presentation and first impressions are everything! So I thought it was worth mentioning a fairly inexpensive way of how to build your own color business card and then get it printed for an affordable and cheap price.
First of all a typical business card measures 2 by 3 1/2 inches and usually they're printed on at least 120 pound card stock (as a reference point, typical copy paper is usually 20 or 24 pound, so the card stock is a lot thicker). A common business card will have a person's name, title and contact info and maybe a graphic, a headshot or photograph is also pretty common. Don't try and turn your business card into a brochure, keep it light with your basic contact information.
Now this is where a lot of folks get hung up, so when you're building your business card you'll want to be aware of these things:
Printed materials that use color are almost always printed using the CMYK color space, which is a 4 color process. And the resolution is almost always higher, usually 300 dpi. Where people get hung up is between the CMYK color space and the RGB color space, which is what we all see when we look at our computer screens, they're completely different and even most desktop printers use the RGB color space when they print, so it can cause a lot of confusion. Another point worth mentioning is make sure you're using raster based images instead of vector based images especially if you're using photographs.
Rasterizing an image simply means that it gets translated into a bunch of really small dots that trick your eye into thinking it sees a continuous toned image, where a vector based image usually is a continuous, line based drawing. Take a real close look at any picture in the newspaper and you'll see what I'm talking about. A common program like Adobe's Photoshop will let you easily set all of these things as needed to make a correct file. Scanning images for your business cards should be done properly; use the CMYK color space and set your resolution at two times the line screen to which you'll be printing (most times the line screen used is a maximum of 150 lpi, so no more than 300 dpi should be used for you scanned image settings.) Oh yeah I just remembered, if your design is going to bleed off of the edge of your business card add an extra one sixteenth of an inch to the dimension of your card so that when they cut it down after printing the bleed looks good and sharp.
Years ago the print process was very different and expensive but today you can get a few hundred business color business cards printed for $20 to $40 dollars. A common quantity is 500 and the price points actually work in your favor if you print a higher quantity. I've done business with printingforless.com, overnightprints.com and Print Place - they've all done nice work for me. Be sure that you provide your computer file in a format that your commercial printer accepts, so it would be a good idea finalize those details with your commercial printer.
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- Rich Leach
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Please keep your posts relevant to the topic: HOW TO PRODUCE YOUR OWN COLOR BUSINESS CARDS. All non-relevant postings and/or spam will be removed.
- February 25, 2011, 2:53 PM
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