Business Card Artwork Setup

Business card artwork should be relatively straight forward but can be confusing for people who do not deal with graphics or printers very often. RCS thought we would give you a brief article to show how most printers require the artwork to be submitted. We say ‘most’ as it can vary with printers but this is the most commonly used setup we have come across.

Firstly create your artwork / new file. This should be a single PDF sile, CMYK, 300dpi containing all the artboards required. Single sided business cards would contain a single artboard. Double sided business cards, 2, front and then back.

The below business card artwork is setup for a double sided cards.

Some people add reg or cut marks, no bleed or objects directly to the edge etc. The above artboards overall size are each 91x61mm. This size includes 3mm bleed area alround. Bleed areas are used to extend print images etc over the finished size so you are not left with white edges and / or registration errors.

The finished size of your business card is shown as the pink stroke / line and is 85x55mm, a fairly industry standard business card size for standard shaped business cards. Other types of business cards such as square and folded are available.

The safe zone, indicated by the green stroke / line, sits inside the finished size of the card by 2-3mm. It is suggested to keep any important text or images inside of this area to avoid being cut off when trimming.

Another example are business cards requiring spot gloss uv. Below you will see a similar setup as before but this time utilising 4 artboards in a single pdf in running order. Front print, Back print, front spot uv, back spot uv. For best results the sections requiring spot gloss should be in vector format and containg solid black only.

RCS Digital Printing offer design services if required, please contact us today for a quote or with any questions you may have.

Looking for some seriously cool business card artwork ideas then pop over to our friends at Canva for some inspiration today.