today we're going to explore why portrait business cards are used opposed
to a landscape design and I'm also going to show you some really useful and some
handy tips when designing a portrait business card in Adobe Illustrator so
the question of the day is why go portrait instead of landscape well
firstly a portrait business card is more contemporary and more unique on a
standard landscape design this gives the final outcome a sense of being superior
and it's just more interesting in general and it can also be seen as
modern now landscape design solution is not going to be relevant and useful for
every single client that wants a business card so do make sure to have a
discussion with your clients on using either a landscape or portrait design
I'd personally would suggest that you take into account the background of the
client and their company as well as the brown message in general now if this
does fit with a contemporary a modern or superior kind of image then a poet or a
business card might be exactly what the doctor ordered so if you do choose to go
along the portrait design methods what kind of measurements should you be using
a standard measurement that I personally use that fits neatly into most of
wallets is 55 millimeters in width by 85 millimeters in height this is a very
Universal under standard size for business cards and I would actually
leave some links and down below that go into more detail on various different
sizes of business cards around the world
now let's go ahead and set up a document in Adobe Illustrator perfect for a print
ready portrait business card so come up to file then new and I personally use
millimeters as the measurement values and as we've just mentioned 55 is the
width and 85 is going to be the height and we want to use two different
artboards so we have a back and a front for the business card design below this
is where we can change the size of the bleeds and a bleed is essential for
print designs more about that later but I'm going to use five millimeters with a
bleed and you can always just click the link icon to spread the bleed
measurement around the entire design so finally you must use CMYK as the color
mode for a business card and also a 300 PPI for the resolution making sure your
design is going to print out crisp and clean so here is our document and the
white area is the artboard and this is where your design is going to be seen
the gap between the white board and the red line is the bleed area and you need
to make sure your design covers this area too
but only the backgrounds are not text or essential contents this bleed area is
going to be cut away and trashed later by the printer you can also use margins
and document set up but just make sure to keep content in and away from the
edge of the artboard so for a minimum portrait and business card design
I suggest creating a simple a3 color group scheme and I've gone for the three
colors shown in the left now press M for the rectangle tool and cover your
artboard and the bleed area with one shape you can impress I for the
eyedropper tool and sample your color examples at the top
then press a V for a selection tool and hold down alt or the option key and then
click and drag to duplicate the background over the entire I avoid for a
portrait business card it's a good technique to contrast the back to the
front in terms of color and to prevent your backgrounds moving around through
the entire process select both of them and then press command or control 2 on
your keyboard which is going to lock them down now I personally really like
having the logo or the main focus of the design on the front displayed in the
middle by itself a good tip to make sure it's centered properly is to press
command or control Y to enter into outline mode and then you should see a
dots that depicts the center of your outboards you can then move the design
into the center looking to align both the center dot of the artboard and the
center dot of your design elements to exit out of the outline mode just press
command or control Y again I've skipped ahead a bit to save you from the tedious
aspects of that in text but to give you the quick rundown make sure you keep all
of your text around five millimeters in from the edge which is the same size as
your bleeds also you don't want text right up to the edge of your printed
business card I also have created some color repetition in using the background
color for the front side on the logo again on the other side in the top left
corner using hierarchy on your typography content is always going to be
a smart move when it comes to your business card design and so as you can
see my name is larger and more bold than the other text content on the back of
the card I went ahead and used a guide to align
everything to the left and that's another crucial aspect for your business
card looking decent analyst a professional so we're now ready to
export our design for prints and to do that just come up to file and save as
and then use the Adobe PDF or print file formats you want to use the most recent
version of Acrobat here and also just make sure to check the view PDF after
saving option
now by default the compression should be okay but here are my settings if you
want to see them the marks and the bleed settings are important and you for sure
want to use the crop and trim mark settings and the others are basically up
to you if you want to use them the remaining settings are probably fine
and if you do have any warnings or issues illustrators gonna flag them in
the summary section and as you can see I don't have any and because we used a
view after saving option acrobat has automatically opened the file and to
properly view your business card come up to view and then to facing the lines in
the corner of your design are where the printer is going to cut and crop the
business card removing the bleed area now in the
second mock-up I have changed the positioning of the smaller logo on the
back of the card and also the dimensions of this mock-up or more narrow and thin
but like I said earlier in the tutorial there are links down below for you to
explore and to learn some more on this topic and if you do want to keep
learning key and essential aspects of graphic design be sure to subscribe to
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this channel I hope you have a great day and of course until next time design
your future today peace