Learn how to create a professional business card using Adobe InDesign. This step-by-step guide will walk you through the process of setting up your document, creating design elements, and adding color to your business card.
Key Insights
- The tutorial begins by setting up a new file in Adobe InDesign, specifying the dimensions as 3.5 inches in width and 2 inches in height with a landscape orientation.
- The tutorial proceeds by demonstrating how to add design elements like rectangles and guides, and how to manipulate these elements to form the layout of the business card.
- The tutorial also explains how to add color to the design using hex color codes, how to remove the stroke or outline from the design elements, and how to save your work in Adobe InDesign.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
In this video we'll continue working on our Strategy Skyline business card. So here we have our five different rectangle colors and we now want to extend these with them touching across our entire business card.
In order to do this let's first zoom in using CTRL + (PLUS) on the keyboard and now we want to move each of these rectangles so that they're touching. To do this I'll select the first rectangle and I'll simply drag it up. In order to drag it up in a straight line we'll hold Shift on the keyboard so that we're only dragging vertically or horizontally.
In this case we'll drag vertically until it snaps right against the bottom of the top rectangle. We'll do the same thing with the rectangle below holding Shift and snapping it to the bottom of the top rectangle. And finally we'll move our last two rectangles up.
Once we have all of our rectangles touching against each other we're going to drag a selection box with the Selection tool and we'll click and drag over all five rectangles. From here we'll drag down changing the dimensions so that it's all the way to the bottom of our business card. From here we'll want to make sure that we have the dimensions right.
So let's zoom in and as we can see it's not all the way to the right-hand side or to the top. So let's select all of our rectangles again dragging the selection box, and we're going to drag the top all the way so it matches to the top of our business card. And using this square on the right-hand side we'll drag all the way to the right so it's flush with the right-hand side.
Holding CTRL I'll zoom out to the left and we'll do the same on the left-hand side. Therefore now that we have all of our rectangles perfectly in line and sized appropriately to the right-hand side of the business card we're ready to make sure that this now fits within the bleed. Because the bleed cuts off part of our image we need to adjust the size of these rectangles so that they fit appropriately within the bleed.
Therefore since it's cutting off the top and right-hand side of this top yellow we need to drag this yellow all the way to the top and all the way to the right-hand side. This will give us the cutout of this top yellow square. For these next three we'll highlight all three holding Shift as we click all three rectangles and then using the white square on the right-hand side we can adjust the size dragging to the right.
Finally for our bottom rectangle we can adjust the bottom-right-hand side using the square on the bottom-right corner and we'll drag so it's in line with our bleed. From here if we zoom out using CTRL—(MINUS) we can see that we now have colors of rectangles that stretch beyond our page and all the way to the edge of our bleed. If we hit W on the keyboard to preview or if we go to the bottom-left-hand side in our toolbar and select preview holding the left mouse button down and releasing on preview we can see what our business card will look like.
We'll hit W to go back to normal mode and now we can continue editing. Let's save our work hitting CTRL + S on the keyboard and next let's work on adding our logo on the left-hand side of our business card. In order to do this we'll again go to File, Place to place an external image.
From here within our Strategy Skyline brand materials folder we'll select our Strategy Skyline logo and click open. As we can see similar to the text we'll see a preview of this image on the left-hand side. We'll click and drag and when you're happy with the size simply release and here we now have our logo on the left-hand side of our business card.
If we want to change the side we might think to grab the corner and drag it up and to the left to make it smaller. However we'll see that it actually just cuts off part of our image. This is because there are actually two elements that we're working with.
Let's hit CTRL + Z to undo. The first element with the blue box is actually our image frame. The image frame holds the image inside.
In order to move the actual image we can click on this circle right in the middle when we see the hand tool and if we click, we’ll actually select the image within the image frame. From here if we click and drag we'll see that we can move the entire image within the image frame. By doing so only the image that's within the image frame is shown.
So let's now move it back to the center of our frame. We'll then hit CTRL + Shift + A to deselect all and let's talk about another way to select our image. Using the Selection tool we can select the image frame.
However if we use the Direct Selection tool we can click on the actual image itself to move it. I'll hit CTRL + Z. Let's again deselect the entire object hitting CTRL + Shift + A and let's discuss how we can resize this image as well as the image frame. To do this we'll hit V on the keyboard for our Selection tool and selecting the image frame we can actually resize this image frame and image together by holding CTRL right before we click and drag to a new size.
If I click and drag to this size we'll see that I’ve resized both the image and the image frame. However in this case it's skewed. So again we'll hit CTRL + Z to undo and let's talk about resizing it proportionally.
If we hold CTRL before resizing this we'll change both the size of the image and image frame. However if we hit CTRL + Shift we'll maintain proportions as we change the size of the image and image frame. In this case I'll make it slightly smaller to this size and we'll see that both the image and image frame have maintained proportions.
While resizing can sometimes be a little confusing inside InDesign it's important to remember that there are actually two elements and depending on what you have selected you can make modifications that way. As our final step here let's now center this on the left-hand side of our business card. To do this let's create two guides one dragging from the ruler and we're going to put it right at a quarter of the way across or right at 0.875 inches and from the top we'll drag another guide down to one inch.
Remember to hold Shift to move at increments. We'll release and finally we'll grab our text frame and move it so that the X in the center is in line with both guides. We'll release, and we now have our logo centered on the left-hand side of our business card.
Let's hit W to preview our business card and this looks good. We'll hit W again to go back to normal mode and let's hit CTRL + S to save our work thus far. In the next video we'll be adding icons and text.
See you there!