Hello everyone this is Chris from Spoon Graphics
back with another video tutorial.
Today I'm going to run through the process of designing a business card and talk about
some of the important things to consider when designing for print.
It's super important that you get things like bleed, color mode and resolution right when
you're creating your artwork, otherwise you might end up having your files rejected by
the printer, having to start again from scratch or even worse, receiving hundreds of prints
back that look nothing like your design!
So hopefully this guide will cover each step and ensure your print projects go smoothly.
Business cards are a common printed product that are fairly simple to design, but before
you start, make sure you receive specific artwork instructions from the printer you're
going to use.
Every company has their own preferences, so the settings I'm using in this tutorial might
not match up exactly to what your printer wants, but at least you'll know what they're
referring to when they say stuff like trim size and bleed size.
We're going to use a mix of Illustrator and Photoshop to make the most of each application's
strengths.
The overall design will be composited in Illustrator, so we'll start there.
Create a new document and enter the dimensions of the business card in the artboard size
settings.
A common business card size is 88x55mm, but again, make sure you check with your printer
first on their exact product specs.
If you're in the US, you'll probably find the measurements are in inches as opposed
to millimeters.
The print firms I've used required 3mm bleed, so enter 3mm in one of the bleed fields and
press Tab to apply it to all sides.
Bleed is basically some padding around the edge of the design which is cut off during
the printing process.
It ensures that you don't end up with tiny slithers of white paper along the edge of
your prints if the machine isn't lined up exactly.
We're designing for print, so select the CMYK color mode so we're working in Cyan, Magenta,
Yellow and Black inks as opposed to RGB light.
Then most business cards are double sided, so increase the number of artboards to 2.
The main white area of the artboard is the finished business card size, also known as
the trim size.
The red outline indicates the bleed area which any backgrounds will need to extend to.
It's also wise to highlight a safe area within your document.
This not only makes sure your important elements like a name or logo aren't too close to the
trim area that they risk being chopped off, it also helps balance your design by applying
some margin around the edge.
The size of the safe zone is entirely up to you but 5-10mm shifts your elements inwards
enough to look neat.
You can highlight this area using guides, or draw a rectangle then right click and select
Make Guides.
I want a black background for my card design, so I'll grab the rectangle tool and draw a
shape that covers the entire bleed area, clearing out the stroke to leave just the fill colour.
A black background sounds simple enough, but there's a whole plethora of different blacks
in print design.
If you move the colour picker to black you'll notice it's made up 0,0,0 in RGB, which means
there's no light so it's as dark as you can get, but look over at the CMYK values and
they're all over the place, totalling at 329% - This is way too much ink to be printed when
you consider the general limit is around 260%.
There's a basic 100% K black, which uses just the black ink from the standard CMYK process
colours.
This is good for text because just using one ink out of the four CMYK colours means you'll
get the sharpest possible print, but when it's applied to a large area it can look a
bit washed out.
Rich black is the term used for mixes of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black that result in a
deeper black.
A common one on 50, 40, 40, 100, which refers to the percentages of the four CMYK colours
you set in your software and the amount of ink printed with each plate.
The trouble is, this particular colour mix uses all four plates, so it has a high risk
of misregistration which can cause fuzzy text, often seen on cheap newspaper prints.
A couple more common blacks are warm black and cool black, which mix 100% K with 50%
Cyan or Magenta.
These two recipes only use two plates so it's much safer to use with small text while still
darkening the black.
The difference between them, as their names suggest, is one has more of a cooler blue
tone, whereas the other has a warmer browny red tone.
I'm going to use blue elsewhere in my design so I'll go with cool black to complement it.
Set up the colour manually by entering the relevant percentages in the CMYK values.
You can now begin building your business card design by bringing in a logo.
Scale it to size and align it to the safe zone guides.
There's no white ink in printing, unless it's a super specialist print.
Giving something a white fill in your software will translate to the other elements being
knocked out to allow the paper to show through.
When entering the text for your print design, 6pt is usually the lowest you'll want to go.
A business card is held up close so you can get away with generally smaller type, but
be careful if you're using elegant fonts with high contrast, there's a point where fine
lines become unprintable.
The slab-serif Achille font I'm using is pretty robust so it can handle 6pt even in its Regular
weight.
One thing to keep in mind when designing for print is the paper stock forms a large part
of the final design, which you don't get to see on screen.
A lot of people try to add gradients and drop shadows to make their designs more interesting,
but these often just muddy the final print.
An area of flat colour might look boring on screen, but when its printed you'll see the
texture of the paper with a matte or glossy finish.
In my design I'm enclosing the main name and contact info in a white box, which needs extending
up to the bleed area.
The text within this area needs to be black.
I could keep using cool black with 50% Cyan, but there's not really any point seeing as
the text isn't a large enough area to see the difference.
All it does is risk misregistration, so instead normal 100% K is the better option.
For the other side of my business card design I'm going to leave the background white but
make use of a photo, so Photoshop comes into play here to use its strengths as an image
editor.
We need to recreate the business card document size in PSD format, so create a new document
and change the dimensions to millimeters.
Photoshop doesn't have a separate bleed setting so we need to calculate the total dimensions.
88mm plus 3mm on each side equals 94mm, and likewise 55+3+3=61mm.
All print work needs to be 300ppi, so change the resolution to 300 pixels per inch, then
set the color mode to CMYK.
We can't see where the actual trim line is but setting the safe zone up using guides
will make sure the elements are laid out nicely.
A quick way to do this is to set the size of a marquee then snap the guides to it.
I want to have the logo and a tagline on this side of the card so I'll paste in the logo
graphic from Illustrator and type out the text with the relevant font.
Usually it's advised to add all your text in Illustrator because it's made in crisp
vectors rather than fuzzy pixels, but I'm going to overlay a photo, so Photoshop is
the best option in this scenario.
I've downloaded this space scene from Shutterstock.
Pasting it into the document will automatically convert it to CMYK and reformat it to 300ppi.
This is a nice high resolution stock photo so I've actually got to scale it down a lot.
You don't want to try and use small images from the web because they'll only be the size
of a postage stamp in print terms, unless you upscale them, which will make them look
totally ugly.
The effect I'm looking for can be created using a layer mask.
Filling it with black hides the entire photo, then the areas I want visible can be selected
and filled white.
Use Photoshop any time you're working with textures and images as part of your print
designs, then add text and logos in vector format over the top in Illustrator.
When you're done, save the file as a JPG using the normal Save As command so it retains the
resolution and colour mode.
Back in Illustrator this background can be placed onto the artboard for the other side
of the business card.
Before exporting the final print file it's wise to outline your fonts by pressing CMD+A
to Select All, then CMD+Shift+O to Create Outlines.
This eliminates any chance of your font not being picked up when it's opened on the printer's
computer and defaulting to something boring.
Go to File > Save As and select PDF.
There's some options to add printer's marks but unless your printer has specifically asked
for them just leave them off.
There's also a PDF setting here that might be required.
This file now contains both business card sides in one print ready document.
You can give the file a quick check over by opening it in Adobe Acrobat.
Look for the Output Preview tool and toggle the various plates to see how the design will
be printed using the 4 process colours.
In my design you can see Magenta and Yellow aren't used at all on the first side and just
black is used on the name area.
On the other side, the photo is made up of various percentages of all four colours.
If you're new to print design this video might have bombarded you with loads of information,
but hopefully it was a comprehensive guide to the things you need to consider when setting
up a print file.
If you did find the video useful a thumbs up to help spread the word would be really
appreciated and if you want to stick around for more, remember to hit that subscribe button.
So thank you very much for watching and I'll catch you all later.