Why pay someone to make business cards for you when you can do it yourself? All you need is Adobe Photoshop, a printer, and some cardstock (available at Staples or similar stores). This tutorial will teach you how to make a basic business card. This is by no means the only way, and you can alter the design any way you want. Just do whatever you think will look best. Let’s get started.

1. First, create a new document in Photoshop. It should have the settings below.

2. Now, you should have a blank canvas sitting in front of you. If you have a logo you want to use, go ahead and incorporate it. Otherwise you can whip something up now (or just use some other image relevant to the card). I’ll use a picture of an Apple Mac Pro, since I’m too lazy to make a logo. Whatever image you use, it needs to be converted to the same resolution as the card (300 dpi). To do that, open up the image and click Image > Image Size. If the resolution is not listed as 300, change it (and make sure the result looks fine). It may look a touch blurry if you zoom in a lot, but you can’t really tell until you print it out for the first time. Don’t worry about the size of the image, you can always use Free Transform (Ctrl+T) on it later.

3. Paste the logo or other image into your card document. Use Free Transform (Ctrl+T) to resize it to the proper size. Drag the logo over to the left of the canvas. It should look something like this.

4. Now get out your Text Tool. Set it for about 36pt and choose black as the color. Pick a font (I chose Diamond SF, which you may or may not have). Add the name of your company/website in nice big letters. I right-clicked the type and chose “Faux-Bold” to give the text a bit more power.

5. Now you can fill in some more information about your company/website. Use a more legible font like Garamond, Times New Roman, or Verdana. For a font size, use a smaller level (like 8-12pt). You should get something sort of like this:

6. The business card is starting to shape up nicely. You can stop adding stuff now and have a nice, clean-looking card, or you can continue to add more stuff to the card. For example, a semi-transparent Apple Logo would look nice.

7. Now the card is about finished. We need to make some final preparations, though. We need to put a small border around the edges of the image so we can cut the cards apart after they’re printed. Make a new layer (Ctrl-Shift-N) and hit Ctrl-A to select everything. Go Select > Modify > Border, and enter a value of 5 pixels. Hit enter. Now set your foreground color as black. Hit Shift-F5 and select “Foreground Color” from the dropdown. Press OK. You can now deselect with Ctrl-D. You should end up with something like this:

8. Go ahead and save your image. You have a few choices to print your cards. I think there’s an entry in the File> Automate menu that will print an image several times on one piece of paper. If not, then you can “Copy Merged” (Ctrl-Shift-C) and Paste the image several times into a new document (7.5 x 10 inches at 300 dpi). Arrange them and then print that document. I reccommend printing onto normal paper first to make sure everything is all right. If it works, load up the cardstock and print.

9. Use scissors or a paper cutter to slice the sheets into individual cards.

10 (because you can’t have a tutorial with only nine steps). Hand your nice new business cards out people, tack them up on bulletin boards, or whatever you do with business cards.

Well, that’s all folks! Business cards are a useful thing to have if you’re a website, an individual, or…well…a business. I have some cards for the websites I run, so I don’t have to find a pen and scrap of paper if someone wants to know the URL. I tack them up on bulleting boards too.

Happy Photoshopping!

Originally posted on April 18, 2007 on my old blog at redwallhp.ntugo.com.

Tags: Photoshop