Make Simple yet Stylish Business Card Using Photoshop

Business cards are used for various business transactions. It is a good tool to bridge the gap between you and your clients or business associates.

Here is an easy step by step guide in designing a simple yet sophisticated looking standard sized business card using Adobe Photoshop. If you want to make your cards but don’t have Photoshop, you can try using online design applications for your business card printing.

Note: Click on images for large previews.

Final Work:

You can download also final work PSD from here.

Step 1

Depending on your printing company, you may need different dimensions –standard size plus bleed. Since we’re making a standard sized business card, make a new project, preset to custom and set width to 3.75 and height to 2.25 inches. Set resolution to 300dpi so your image will return crisp when printed and color mode to CMYK for it be fit for printing.

Insert guides for you to see the edges of your business card. Click View and select New Guide. Set Horizontal to 0.125inch position repeat for Vertical. Repeat for the two remaining sides with Vertical at 3.625inch and Horizontal at 2.125inch.

After the process you should have a blank canvas that looks like the image below with bleed guides away from the canvas edge, don’t forget to make background into layer.

Step2

Insert background, here I used color gradient as background. Select gradient tool; choose the color that you like. Here I used green and applied the gradient in horizontal direction. Next select the rectangle tool and choose blue color (or any other color that you like). Make a rectangle shape at the bottom of your canvas and rasterize the selection (you can rasterize the rectangle shape by right clicking on it at the layers panel then select rasterize).

Next apply blur effects on your rectangle layer by choosing filter on the menu, then blur, then Gaussian blur, set to 25. You should have something like the image below.

Next warp your rectangular image by choosing edit from the menu, select transform, and then warp. You may start warping the rectangle image according to the form you like. Once done, hit enter then apply Gaussian blur again.

Step3

Make another rectangle shape, this time I chose green. Follow the same procedure as what you did with the blue rectangle.

Lastly, when you have achieved the form you like, merge blue and green rectangle. You can do this by holding control key, clicking on the green and blue rectangle layer on the layer panel, right click on them then select merge layers.

Step4

Manipulate the merged blue and green rectangular shapes till you get the look you like. Insert your company logo and content. You can do this by drag and dropping your company logo to your canvas. Make sure your company logo is in .PNG format. You may insert content by choosing the text tool in your tool bar then inserting it anywhere in your canvas. You don’t have to worry about the positions since you can reposition each block of text to your liking as long as they are saved in separate layers.

 

 

You should have something that looks like the image below after step 4. You may reposition the content of your business card anywhere in the canvas. Just make sure that they are within the bleed lines.

Design Tutorial Final

There you have it, a simple yet stylish looking one sided business card.
Elmor Go, though he doesn’t look like it, is a geek at heart. He likes scouring the internet for fantastic artworks both conventional and radical. He’s a blogger for the UPrinting network. He writes about business card printing, brochure designs, and catalog printing.