Discover the technical intricacies of perfecting the design of a business card. This article provides a comprehensive, step-by-step guide to adjusting visual elements and ensuring a professional finish.
Key Insights
- The process requires careful adjustments to the size and position of visual elements such as rectangles and logos. The adjustment ensures a professional and harmonious design.
- It is important to make final adjustments to the bleed at the end of the work, to avoid the need for constant readjustments throughout the project. This involves extending all elements all the way to the edge of the bleed.
- Certain tools such as the alignment options within the control bar can help center visual elements accurately. This ensures a balanced and appealing visual aesthetic for the business card.
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In this video we'll be working on the other side of our business card. So let's begin first by gathering all the elements that we'll be duplicating on the other side. In order to make sure that we have five rectangles that are all the same size, we first need to adjust these rectangles so that they're the same size rather than the size necessary for the bleed.
So let's reduce the size of these by selecting them and simply dragging them until they snap to the edge of the business card. And this brings up a good point that it's often important to make your final adjustments to the bleed at the end of your work so that you're not consistently readjusting it throughout the project such as we have. Now let's select each of these rectangles.
We'll do this by dragging a selection box and with them all selected, let's also hold Shift on the keyboard to also add our logo to our selection. From here we'll hit CTRL + C on the keyboard to copy and let's scroll down to page 2 or within Pages we can actually double-click page 2 in order for it to show up within our view. Let's zoom out now and adjust our view holding CTRL and scrolling down and we're now ready to paste our elements into this other side of the business card.
So let's hit CTRL + V to paste all of our elements. The first thing we'll want to do is simply select these five rectangles and turn them 90 degrees. In order to do so we'll click outside to deselect and then we'll select all five of them dragging the selection box and with them all selected we now want to rotate them.
To do this we could right-click and select transform and rotate or we can simply select rotate 90 degrees or counterclockwise. Additionally with them selected we can also go to the edge until we see the arrows around the edge over any edge and this will allow us to click and drag rotating it to our liking. As we rotate this way if we hold Shift we can see that it rotates only at 45-degree angles.
So let's release with this rotation and now we have our bars at a 45-degree angle. Next we need to stretch them out so they span the entire business card. To do this let's first drag the bottom up so it's not covering the entire business card from top to bottom and then we'll drag them from left to right.
Dragging first on the left-hand side and then on the right-hand side. Once they span the entire distance we can additionally drag them to the top of our bleed as they'll need to extend all the way to the edge of the bleed. From here let's also add a guide so that they span all the way through the top quarter inch.
We'll drag from our ruler and holding Shift we'll release right at 0.25 inches. Next with our rectangles still selected let's drag them until they snap right at this guide. If we click outside now, we can see that they span the entire distance from left to right for the top quarter inch.
However, now we do need to adjust our bleeds. On the left-hand side we'll simply drag this rectangle to the edge of the bleed so that it covers the top and left-hand side and on our right we'll drag it to the right-hand side so it covers the top and right-hand side. If we hit W to preview we'll see that they're still the same size however we hit W again they extend all the way to the edge of the bleed.
Next we'll need to center our logo so let's select our logo and this time rather than lining it up with two guides let's simply have it selected, and we're going to align it using our alignment options within the control bar. From here we'll select how we want to align it and we'll align it to the entire page. From here we'll then align it horizontally center as well as vertically center.
And here we go, we’ve now finished up the other side of our business card. Let's hit W to see a preview and this looks good. Feel free to change the size of any of these if you feel they need to be a bit taller or we need our logo a bit bigger and let's double-click page one within our Pages panel to see a preview of this as well.
Well done, this looks good. Let's now save our work hitting CTRL + S on the keyboard to save and in the next video we'll begin working on our third business card. We'll close this out and I'll see you in the next video.