There are many budget design options out there for people who are trying to create their own company business cards. They range from the completely ‘homespun’ method of doing-it-yourself on your inkjet printer, to paying for a freelance designer or budget online logo company to create your business card for you. You may want to consider using the Business Card Templates resources that can be easily found online.
As a designer and marketing manager with over a decade of industry experience (working for large corporations, print companies, as well as freelancing for small business clients) I feel qualified enough to offer you my own insight into creating your business card using Business Card Design that you can find on almost all online print sites.
Your cheapest-of –the-cheap business card template option is to design and print business cards yourself using those perforated Avery business card sheets that you can buy at Staples for $16.00. Don’t do it!!! I mean, there’s doing it yourself, and then there’s trying to feed cardstock through a printer and making a complete inky mess!
Here’s a rundown of the problems you’ll encounter when ‘shoe stringing’ your business cards with an Avery business card template and an Inkjet Printer:
Greeting Card Design You’re going to have to create your business card design in Microsoft Word, Open Office, or other such office program that was clearly never meant for designing and printing business cards!
Those Microsoft Word templates are unbelievably frustrating to work with. As an experienced designer, even I find it difficult to try to create a half-decent business card layout. The biggest problem with Avery templates (hidden somewhere in the bowels of the ‘envelope’ menu in the ‘tools’ header) is that you have to create a whole page of business cards at once. The business card template is populated by two columns of business card ‘cells’ (that roughly match your perforated print sheets) in which you are required to individually ‘cut and paste’ your design elements. During this tedious cut and paste process, hitting the wrong key, or pressing return where you’re not supposed to will result in a jumbled series of Business Card Printing cells with all the text, shapes, objects, lines, or images in bizarre alignments.
Using plain text to create your business card design will probably work out fine, but just try to insert any pictures from an outside file or include shapes or images from your picture menu and you’re asking for trouble – trying to align them inside a cell just doesn’t work!
From a Bookmarks Printing Services point-of-view, using the design elements in Word is not advisable. The auto shapes and clip art available from the insert menu have barely changed since the 90’s. They represent a garish and fluorescent mix of random images that I last saw being used to ‘spruce up’ my schoolteacher’s handouts! It would also be ill advised to use any text effects from the Word Art menu. The choice of bubblegum-style, gradient-heavy effects on offer will make your business card look like you gave it to a high-school cheerleader to design!
Once you have your design ready to go to print then you will encounter a whole new set of jamming and ink running problems. These are the same inkjet printer problems that that you’ve probably encountered every day, but intensified due to the difficulties of using thicker paper and the need for exact print alignment. You are almost guaranteed to end up with an ink-splattered and poorly aligned set of business cards (text running off-center, and out of square, and you can forget about creating any kind of image bleed!)
If you’ve managed to get to the stage where you have printed sheets of business cards without smashing your printer or throwing your monitor out of the window, then you can begin the fun of bending and tearing the perforated business cards. This is not easy. Not only is it fiddly and time consuming, but you’re certain to ruin a few business cards that won’t tear properly down the perforations!
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