Explore the meticulous process of designing a business card using specific design software. This guide provides a step-by-step walkthrough, from creating a new file and determining dimensions, to choosing color schemes and positioning text.
Key Insights
- The article instructs on setting up dimensions for a business card design, including file setup, size specifications in inches, and the importance of adding a margin and bleed for print safety.
- In the design process, the color scheme is vital. The tutorial guides on creating a background, using an Eyedropper tool to match colors, and changing the color of text for contrast and visibility.
- The article contains detailed steps for adding and formatting text, including the selection of font type, size adjustments, positioning, and applying a stroke around the text for emphasis.
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In this video we'll be creating our third business card. Let's begin by creating a new file, going to File, New, and Document, and we'll go again to Print, and let's start by giving our title a new name. We'll title this file Shooting Star Co.
Business Card. We'll also change the units to inches, and the width to 3.5 × 2 inches, using Tab to move to the next box. We'll change pages to 2 again, since we'll both have a front and back of the business card.
And if we scroll down, this time we're going to add a margin, and we'll discuss what this looks like once we've opened our file. For our margin, we're going to change it down to 0.125 inches, making sure that on the top, bottom, inside, and outside, we're at 0.125 inches. For our bleed, we'll also add a bleed at 0.125 inches, and we'll ignore the slug.
Finally, we'll click Create. If we close our Properties panel, and zoom out, let's take a look at this file. We currently have our bleed mark with the red line, and on the inside here, this pink line is our margin line.
Many times in files, we'll use margins as areas that we want to keep safe. We have this margin so that once the image is actually cut from the bleed, everything on the inside is relatively safe and away from where the cut mark is, just in case it's cut a little bit inside. This is our safe zone, and it's provided by the margin.
So let's now save this file, going to File, Save, and we'll save this within our folder. Clicking Save. On our last two business cards, we were very specific about having guides and measurements.
However, for this business card, we're going to do this a little bit more freeform. So let's first start by adding a background to our entire business card. In order to do this, we'll utilize our Rectangle tool, and let's just draw a rectangle that's wider than the entire page, as well as the bleed.
We'll release right about here. Let's now change it so it has a fill, but no stroke. We can do this by first going to the top, and for stroke, we'll click to the right-hand side and select None.
And for our fill, we'll double-click the top box for Fill, and let's add kind of a dark sky look. Feel free to choose whatever color you'd prefer, and for me, I'll choose something right about here within our color picker. We'll then click OK, and here we have the background of our business card.
Keep in mind that even though this isn't lined up, if we hit W on the keyboard, we can see that as long as it maintains the entire bleed and page area, it doesn't necessarily have to line up exactly. So let's hit W again. And next, we want to add another rectangular element, utilizing the Rectangle tool.
For this element, simply click and drag around the center, and we'll add a rectangle that's a little bit taller than it is wide. We'll go right about here towards the center. And for this rectangle, let's first start by copying the color of our background.
We can do this utilizing the Eyedropper tool, shortcut I on the keyboard. And so with this rectangle selected, let's simply click on the rectangle behind. We’ll see that it now matches the characteristics of the rectangle behind, and we have this dark color as our fill.
However, instead of this dark color, let's double-click the fill, and let's just simply choose a little bit lighter of a color. I'll choose this color right here. However, feel free to choose whatever color you'd prefer.
And we'll click OK. Here, we now have our center rectangle, as well as our background color. Next, let's add some text.
We'll utilize the Type tool. And let's scroll up a little bit and drag a rectangle for our text. For this text, we're going to type out Shooting Star Co.
And we'll keep it all in lowercase. Let's now highlight this text, and let's work with our font. We'll go to our control bar, or in our Properties panel, where we can change the character.
And we'll click the character, and let's again use Chivo. In this case, let's use Chivo Bold. Next, we need to reduce the size of this so that it fits within the lighter blue.
So I'll simply drop it down to about 11 points. Feel free to change your size as appropriate. And we can now utilize our Selection tool to click and drag all of this text down below to about here.
Again, for this business card, we're going to be a little more freeform and not worry about being exact. We will align things once we've added all of the elements. For this text now, let's change the color of our text from black to white.
In order to do this, if we go to our fill and stroke, we'll see that it has no fill and no stroke. This is because instead of editing the fill and stroke, we need to actually edit the text. We can do this by formatting the text, clicking on the T below.
And here we can now see that our T indicates that we're editing the text and our T is currently set to black. To change this to white, let's double-click it. And let's find white at the top right-hand side of our color picker.
And then we'll drag the right-hand side all the way to the top, giving us white. And the hex code for that as a shortcut is six F's. We'll click OK.
And rather than this just being a plain white text, let's add a little bit of a stroke around the text. We can again do this by editing our stroke in our toolbar or in our control bar. And if we go to the right-hand side, we'll have some presets that are easy to access.
We'll choose black and we now have a black stroke around our text. In order to edit the width of our stroke, we can go to our control bar and we'll see that it's set to one point. If we want to reduce this, we can click down, which drops to zero.
But in our case, we actually want 0.5, so we'll type 0.5 and hit ENTER. From here, let's now line up all of these elements to the center. We can easily do this by selecting all of them and hitting CTRL + A to select all.
And then we'll simply align to the page, clicking align to page, and we'll center this horizontally. If we hit W on the keyboard, we'll see a preview of what this looks like. As one final change, we're going to deselect everything, hitting CTRL + Shift + A, and selecting just our text.
Let's align the paragraph to center. With this, we've now got the basis of our business card. Let's hit CTRL + S on the keyboard to save our work.
And in the next video, we'll be working with lines. See you there.