Somewhere between those pre-perforated inkject card sheets you can get at Office Depot and paying the big bucks and “Ze Art-teest Design Agency,” you’re looking for business cards that suit both your budget and taste. With a little patience, you can have attractive, classy business cards inexpensively. I’ll show you how I do it.
When I started my web design business, I knew I needed business cards but I didn’t have much of a buget. Looking for reasonably priced options, I found a gem of a site called iPrint.com.
I’ve since created several business cards there (for myself and clients) as well as some address labels. I only had one negative experience–one order of labels I got was not printed and cut properly–but when I contacted iPrint, they apologized and promptly replaced them with better quaility labels. That’s been several years ago to boot. Everything else from them has been great! So no hesitations in recomending them.
Get Stared on Your Design
The interface at iPrint is largely intuitive. You’ll mostly need some patience. First select the type of card you’re making. I choose the full color cards since they are the same price as the 1-2 color cards currently and I wanted to use photographs. I’ve also used them before and they came out beautiful when done with colorful photos, so I’m sold now!
There are lots of categories to pick from. And while there were lots of start categories/designs, I always do my own. Many of the templates are just plain ugly!
Adding your Own Background Graphic to your Business Card
I used a high resolution image that I originally snagged for the header on this site, and grabbed the logo I made for this site to get started.
Ideally, you’ll be starting with a good quality, high-resolution version of your logo or/or any other photos you’ll be using. While resolution (DPI) doesn’t matter for web use, it does for printed material. A graphic resolution of 200 – 300 DPI is recommended. If you don’t have that, try up-sampling in your photo editing program, but that may or may not provide satisfactory results. (Check the help in your graphics program for how-to, man.) You goal is to have a high-rez image as large as you want to print it out. Starting with the best quality image you can will give the best results.
From iPrint’s graphic help:
Important Requirements: The maximum graphic size that can be imported is 5 MB (5120 K). We recommend the following graphic formats: .JPG, .TIF, .BMP. You may upload black and white, grayscale and/or color images. We suggest you make the image that you are importing the same size that you’ll use on your design. Low resolution images may print poorly especially when enlarged.
Put Together The Pieces
Upload your graphic and experiement with the fonts, positioning, etc. until you’re happy with how it works. Follow the on-screen instructions to guide you, and you’ll figure it out in short order. But before you add your lovely design to the shopping cart, hold up a second.
The designer software gives you the opportunity to print out a proof of your business cards. Do it! Some issues with a design you simply won’t see on a screen, seriously. I made sure to do a “print preview” from my browser before printing, to specify the page should print at 100%. (Otherwise, it would have scaled down to fit in site copy that we don’t need anyway.) I have yet to print out a business card design without seeing something that could stand to be tweaked. It’s worth the trouble.
What if it’s Ugly?
Well, good grief–don’t order ugly business cards! If a design looks ugly to its creator, it probably won’t fare better with clients. Instead, get a little help. Either hire someone to help, or you check out my favorite beginner’s design book.
For the investment of about an hour, the non-designer’s design skills will improve tremendously. It is information you’ll be able to put to use immediately. Of all the books I’ve gotten on design and sitebuilding over the years, this is the one I recommend most. (By and large, whaver web advice you’ll find in here is outdated, but the design advice is golden and cross-applicable._
The End Result
I got myself a hundred business cards and 300 address labels for under $40. I had to manually adjust the number of cards ordered, since the shopping card defaults to an order of 250. I always make small orders initially for do-it-yourself business cards, to make sure I’m happy with them ordering boatloads.
I’ll let you know how these one turn out when I get them. I haven’t been disappointed thusfar, though. And if you try, let me know how yours come out!
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Posted on February 12, 2009 at 7:48 pm in: Small Biz Tips
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I got these and, like normal, what I got came out even better than I thought they would from the image. Cool!