Creating Business Cards in Adobe Photoshop

Creating business cards in Adobe  Photoshop  is easy. This guide will walk you through the steps to do so.

First, after starting up the  Photoshop  software you can start a new document. To do this, click file on the upper left corner of the program and choose ‘New’ from the drop down menu.

This should bring you to the panel for the specifications of your new document. Business cards are usually 3.5 inches in width and 2 inches in height so you might want to go with that. Just type in 3 in the width box and choose inches on the drop down menu next to it. Do the same for the height except you should type in 2 and then make it in inches as well by choosing inches on the drop down menu next to it.

As for resolution, choose 300 DPI so you will end up with a nice, clear document once everything is done.

Having rulers while working on your business card document is recommended. You can use the rulers by clicking on ‘view’ and ‘show rulers.’ Rulers are really handy in making guide lines to make sure the elements in your business card is centered.

After you have set your document to show the rulers, you can set them to a non-printable line or ‘guides’ on your document. You can create guide lines by clicking on the rulers and dragging them to where you want them on your document.

You will need to these guides work because you will need to do so for the next step in creating your business card. In this case, we use guides as bleed lines, which are the safe, printable areas on your business card layout that you will place your design elements within.

There are other types of ‘lines’ that you should be aware of.

The cut lines serve the purpose of showing where your design will be cut away from the much larger sheet of paper it was printed on. Making cut lines ensures color all the way to the very edge of your cards and that once it is cut, there will be no white spaces on the edge of the card.

The safety lines on the other hand are what the innermost lines are called. Anything outside these lines run the risk of being cut off. Cutting machines may not be very accurate so, staying inside of this area ensures that important text and/or graphics will not be cut away. It also helps your card be more readable during the design process. You will want to keep all of your non-background text, logos, pictures, and other design elements inside of these lines.

To create these guides, you should first create the cut lines. Drag two lines from the top ruler and drag one of them to form a small margin on the top and a margin the same measurement on the bottom. After, drag two lines from the rulers on the left side and drag them to form a small margin the same size as the ones on the top and bottom. You should end up with a kind of frame.

To make the safety lines, repeat the same process and create the frame inside the cut lines.

If you don’t want to go through with making the lines though there are downloadable free templates on the internet. Just download those and then open them in  Photoshop .

After making these lines or downloading a template, you should be all set to layout your graphics and font on your business card.

Once you place all of design elements on the business card template, you should flatten the image. This can be done by right-clicking on ‘Layers,’ and selecting ‘flatten image’ from the drop down menu.

Next, open an 8×11 new document and then paste the images on the entire page. You can paste up to 8 images on the document. Make sure they have enough margins or space between the images.

After it’s printed, you can cut them manually or if you printed the business cards through a printer, they should be able to cut the business cards for you.