Preparing Business Cards for Printing

When creating designs for clients on your computer, all you think about at first is the visual outcome of your work. But eventually, when the designing process is finished, a designer should be able to prepare the designs for print.

What makes a quality print designer is his ability to work on the pre-press preferences to make the actual items look as good as they are on the screen.

Due to various reasons many people avoid talking about the actual pre-printing process, since every printing company’s approach is different, the process is boring or simply full of technical stuff.

Today I’m going to show you how to prepare business cards for printing in basic terms and ideas.

Basic Printing Settings

Presuming you arleady have the design, let’s set up the document for you to send to prints. I’m going to use Adobe Illustrator for all of the preparations, the design was also done in there.

Creating New Document

In my case, I’m creating a two sided business card, so I’m choosing 2 for the number of artboards. Spacing is irrelevant to the prints,so put it in terms of what suits you best.

The standard size of a business card in millimeters is 89 by 51 (or 51 by 89). If you’re using inches, it’s 2 by 3.5 inches. I’ve chosen landscape orinetation for my design, but it’s up to what you’ve created.

Bleed

Working with bleed is very important for the final looks of the cards. What bleed is is safety. When the cards are designed they are being designed on a size that’s 6mm wider and 6mm higher(1/8 inch). That way, once the cards are printed out and trimmed to the standard size, there’s nothing from the design that’s been cropped out.

Usually people would suggest putting all of the text and other information another 3mm from the border so it’s not cut accidentally. I used to do that, but the prints I work with never cut anything accidentally, so I dropped the extra safety as of now. If you’re going to the prints the first time, I suggest you to play it safe.

Advanced Settings

CMYK Color Model

Using CMYK is standard in the printing business. All of the colors you choose for printing should be of CMYK model. Of course you can go ahead and print using RGB model, but the colors can (and most likely will) change and you don’t want that.

The way CMYK model works is that every color is laid separately in order: Black, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow. The order is based on every color’s transparecy, yellow being the most and black being the least transparent.

If you open Color Picker in any of Adobe’s software, you’re gonna see CMYK values in the lower-right corner. That gives you an idea how the color is created when at the prints. In the screenshot below is 100% magenta color.

Raster Effects

The standard printing quality is 300 dpi. You can go with 600, and even though it might not be noticeable, it’s always good to have extra quality. We will change the dpi/lpi settings in the final stage.

Preview Mode

This option doesn’t have anything to do with printing, it’s just the way you see you Illustrator file when working.

Final Preview

In the end will all of the bleeding adjusted, this is what the preview looked like

As you can see, everything that’s in the bleed area is either blank or repeated imagery, so it’s okay if it’s cut off.

Preparing Files for Print

General Settings

• Every printer I worked with required .pdf document in the end. I always bring them original files though, just in case, being .eps or .psd.
• For printer choose Adobe PDF 9.0 or other version if you don’t have 9th installed on your computer.
• PPD stands for PostScript Printer Description and should be on Default if you’re creating a .pdf
• Everything else should be left as it is and the prints company will let you know if anything should be changed according to their settings

Marks and Bleed

In this tab you set up the marks for printers if needed. By default it will use the Illustrator settings we’ve set before that being – 3mm each side bleed area marks.

Output

• For output method choose Composite. This way the file stores all of the information in itself to send to the printer. This is considered standard method.
• For the Printer Resolution try to select the highest quality possible if you’re printing on a high-end machine.

Graphics

Make sure that the flatness is quality over speed, not vice versa. You needn’t to hurry on those things. Prior to converting your work, convert all of the fonts to outlines.

Color Management

These settings are to be chosen with your printing company, otherwise leave those to defaults. They determine the way printer reads colors and the way colors make themselves readable.

Advanced

Advanced settings should be left untouched, unless told otherwise by the printers.

Summary

Last tab is Summary and it gives you another look at the settings you’ve chosen. If those are alright, you can save your .pdf for printing.

I hope this walkthrough was helpfull and somewhat entertaining. Once again I strongly recommend contacting the printers prior to creating the document, so that the final outcome looks perfect. Every printing company is a bit different, but in whole they’re all pretty much the same.

See you next time!

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