Designing the Back Side of Your Business Card: Adding Text Elements and Aligning to Perfection

Adding Text Elements and Aligning to Perfection: Finalizing the Design of the Second Page

Gain a step-by-step understanding of how to design the backside of a business card using various tools and techniques. This guide focuses on how to create a rectangle, modify colors, add and format text, and adjust alignments for improved visual appeal.

Key Insights

  • The article provides instructions on how to use tools such as the rectangle tool and the eyedropper tool to create and color a rectangle for a business card design.
  • It emphasizes on how to add text elements using the type tool and how to adjust their size, weight, color, and alignment for better readability and aesthetics.
  • The guide includes tips on how to adjust alignments and position of text elements to make the design look more centered and natural, and also mentions the importance of saving your work frequently.

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In this video we're going to be working on the other side of our business card. So let's begin by going to Pages and double-clicking page 2 of our business card. We can now see a view of our second page.

To begin let's create the rectangle on the bottom of our business card. We'll utilize the Rectangle tool and starting at the bottom-left corner and simply click and drag up and to the right until we're about half an inch up the page and we can see exactly where we are as shown by the indicator that moves along the ruler. If we drag over to about halfway or release when we're at the other side of the bleed and about half an inch.

Now we need to modify this from no fill and a black stroke to this color of our background. In order to do this, let's utilize the Eyedropper tool shortcut I on the keyboard and we're going to fill our Eyedropper tool with this color by clicking on it. Once we see that there's black inside our Eyedropper icon we'll scroll down and to apply this to our rectangle we'll simply click the rectangle.

We can see that now our rectangle has the same fill and stroke setting as where we selected with the Eyedropper tool. Next, let's begin adding text elements. To do this, we utilize our Type tool and let's simply draw a rectangle for our first text.

Here we're going to type our name and let's select all of this text and go to the top selecting Chivo and selecting Chivo Bold. From here we can utilize our Selection tool and let's simply drag our text down below here. In addition we want it a little bit closer so let's drag our text frame up a little bit closer to the text and move it down.

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I think this looks good right here. Now let's duplicate this text frame by holding ALT and clicking and dragging to the right-hand side. For this text we're going to triple-click and type student.

Let's hit CTRL + A to select all and we're going to change our paragraph alignment to right align. Remember that you can do this either within the control bar or within the properties panel. If we hit CTRL + Shift + A we'll see that we now have our name and our title.

Let's add some additional details. To do this, let's copy the text frame above using our Selection tool shortcut V on the keyboard and clicking the above text and holding ALT and clicking and dragging below and making a duplicate. From here we'll triple-click the text to select it all and now let's type out our email.

As we can see here all of my text doesn't fit within this text frame as shown by the overset text indicator. Therefore I'll utilize the Selection tool and simply click and drag to the right. In addition I'll want to click and drag down as we'll be adding a second line of text.

Finally, let's triple-click the text again and hit CTRL + A to select all of it and let's drop the font size by clicking down within our control bar. Let's make it nine-point font. We're also going to change the font weight from bold and we're going to change it to light.

From here we'll click at the end and hit ENTER to add a second line of information. For the second line we'll add a phone number and feel free to use your own phone number and here we've completed our text. However, the black text on the dark background doesn't look very good so let's hit CTRL + A to select all of our text and now we're going to change the color from black to white.

To do this, we'll double-click the stroke color and we'll go to the top right-hand side for both of our color pickers and click OK. If we hit CTRL + Shift + A to deselect we'll see that this text looks good. As our next change we want to make sure that we take this text and add another line to the right-hand side.

So let's utilize our Selection tool and select this bottom text element and in this case I'm going to align it so the text is at the bottom aligning to our margin. To do this we'll go to our control bar and select Align Bottom and now we can drag the text frame down just a little bit. From here we'll create a duplicate by holding ALT and dragging to the right until we're lined up on the right-hand side against the margin.

Additionally we're going to change the alignment from left align for our paragraph to right align. We'll double-click inside the text frame hitting CTRL + A and within our control bar we'll right align our paragraph. Finally, for this right-hand side we're simply going to keep the website so we can highlight and delete everything other than the website and hit CTRL + Shift + A to deselect.

Let's see a preview of our work and hit W. I think this looks pretty good so far, however, it feels like it's a little bit brushed up against the left-hand side and right-hand side. So let's change this alignment a little bit. We'll hit W again and with our Selection tool V on the keyboard we'll select the left two text frames and we could create a guide and line them up to the guide or we can use our arrow keys and either nudge them to the right using the right arrow key, we'll go back, or if we hold Shift, it will move multiple spaces if we hold Shift and use the right arrow key.

On the right-hand side we'll do the same thing holding Shift to select both elements and then if we hold Shift and hit the left arrow key we'll align it to the left side. Let's hit W to see a preview of our work and this looks good it looks a little more centered and natural on our page. We'll hit W again to go back to normal mode.

From here let's save our work hitting CTRL + S on the keyboard to save and in the next video we'll finalize this side of the business card. See you there!

Matt Fons

Adobe Instructor

Matt is a jack of all trades in the realm of marketing and an expert using Adobe’s Creative Cloud as the essential software for supporting students and clients. With experience in graphic design, photography, web design, social media planning, and videography, Matt creates impressive and comprehensive marketing strategies. In his free time, Matt and his wife enjoy surfing and hiking California’s Central Coast and traveling to countries around the world.

  • Adobe Certified Instructor
  • Adobe Certified Specialist
  • Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign
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