Business Card Maker

How our business card maker works

A business card has a small job: help someone remember you and reach you. It does not have much room to do it. Our business card maker is built around that. It lays out your details so the name is easy to read, the contact lines are neat, and nothing falls off the edge, and you can spend your time deciding what to say instead of nudging text around.

1. You choose a layout

There are six layouts. Classic is left aligned, with your name on top and contact lines underneath. Centered puts everything on the middle line, with a small logo or monogram above your name. Split has a color panel on one side with your logo and company name. Headshot puts a round photo next to your details, which suits real estate agents, coaches and consultants. Banner has a color band across the top with your name in it. Minimal leaves lots of white space and tucks the contact lines into a corner. Each layout is arranged separately for wide, square and tall cards, so a portrait card is designed for its shape and not stretched.

2. You choose a style and a color theme

Four styles change the whole look: Clean with a white card and crisp type, Bold with a full-color card, Elegant with a dark card, fine lines and serif type, and Creative with soft shapes and rounded type. On top of the style you pick a color theme. There are six, each with a main color, an accent color and a symbol, and you can rename and recolor them. A team can share one theme, or each person can have their own.

3. You fill in your details

Each card has a name, a job title, a company, a short tagline, a phone number, an email, a website, a social handle and an address. There is also an extra line for something like a licence number or an award. Type {star} or {check} in it and the maker draws an icon in the line. There are 16 icons, and you can make words bold by putting them between asterisks. Fields you leave empty are left off the card, and long text shrinks to fit. Small icons sit beside the phone, email, website and address, and you can switch them off.

4. You add a logo and a photo

Upload your logo once and it appears on every card, on the front where the layout has room and on the back. If you do not have a logo yet, the maker draws a monogram from the person’s initials. The Headshot layout uses a round photo you can drag into place and pinch to zoom. Upload a picture, take one with your phone, choose one from the Media Library when you are signed in, or paste an image address.

5. You add a QR code

The QR code can hold your contact details (a vCard), a link to your website, or any text you type for that card. Put it on the back, which keeps the front clean, on the front, or both. Most current phone cameras can read a QR code, and a contact QR code lets the person save your name, number and email straight into their address book. How the phone offers this differs a little between phones, so test it with yours. Because a QR code holds a limited amount of information, the contact code leaves out your address first if everything does not fit.

6. You choose a size

Pick from six sizes: US standard (3.5 × 2 in), US portrait (2 × 3.5 in), Europe (85 × 55 mm), Australia and Asia (90 × 50 mm), square (2.5 × 2.5 in) and slim (3.5 × 1.75 in). Text is scaled to suit the card, so a narrow portrait card gets larger type than a wide one. Corners are square by default, which is what you want for straight cutting. Turn on rounded corners if your cards will be die-cut.

Check your cards before you print them

Under the card gallery, the batch tools show how many different cards you have and how many will be printed counting copies, with charts of cards by layout and by theme. The checks list is the part that saves paper. It looks through the batch and tells you about cards with no name, the same email address used twice, an email that does not look right, cards with no way to reach the person, a Headshot card with no photo yet, text that has to be shortened or left off, contact text that would print too small to read comfortably, and a QR code that has nothing to hold or is too dense to scan easily on a small card.

The random sample button shows six cards from the batch, a quick way to spot-check a long list without scrolling through every card. The checks look at layout and consistency. Whether a phone number or email is correct is up to you.

Make cards for a whole team

The Import tab lets you download a CSV template, fill it in with a spreadsheet program, and import it. Each row is one card: name, layout, theme, title, company, tagline, phone, email, website, address, social handle, the extra line, a QR value and the number of copies. You can replace the current cards or add to them, and export the batch back to CSV any time. Many teams keep the spreadsheet as the master list and use the maker to see and print it.

Add headshots in bulk. Choose many photo files at once. Name each file after the person’s full name, like alex-morgan.jpg, or the part of their email before the @, like alex.jpg, and the maker attaches it to the matching card. It tells you how many matched and which file names did not.

A tip for spreadsheets: programs such as Excel can remove a leading zero or plus sign from phone numbers. Format the phone column as text before you paste your list in. To protect you, the maker also marks any cell that starts with =, +, – or @ when it exports, so a spreadsheet does not run it as a formula, and removes that mark again when you import.

Printing your business cards

• Home printing sheets: cards at actual size on Letter or A4, with cut guides. For the US, Europe and Australia sizes that is ten cards per page. The backs can be printed mirrored so they line up when you print double-sided and flip on the long edge.
• Print-ready PDF: one card per page at the exact card size, repeated by the number of copies, with an optional 0.125 inch bleed. The colors at the edge of the card are extended into the bleed, so there is no white edge after cutting. This is the file to send to a print shop. Check their own size and bleed rules before you order, since they differ.
• Images: PNG or JPG at 150, 300 or 600 DPI with the resolution embedded, one card at a time or as a ZIP of all cards, with fronts and backs.

Print one test sheet on plain paper before you use good card stock, to see how your printer lines up the two sides. The maker does not have an offset setting, so pre-cut or perforated sheets may need a little trial and error. Scan a printed QR code with your own phone before you print a full run. Colors are shown in RGB, so printed colors can look a little different. We design and prepare cards. We do not print or ship them.

Tips for a business card people keep

• Put less on it. Name, title, one or two ways to reach you, and a website is usually enough. Empty space makes a card look confident.
• Keep the type readable. Contact text under about 7 point is hard to read. The checks warn you when it falls below that.
• Use strong contrast. Dark on light or light on dark. Pale text on a pale color looks fine on screen and disappears on paper.
• Stay away from the edges. Trimming is never perfect. The layouts keep about a fifth of an inch clear for you.
• Put the QR code on the back. It keeps the front uncluttered, and the back is a good place for a short line like “Scan to save my contact”.
• Use a short website link. If you choose the website QR option, a short address makes a simpler code that is easier to scan.
• Test before you print. Check spelling, phone numbers and the QR code on a real sheet.

A note on responsible use

Use your real name and details, and only use logos and photos you have the right to use. Please do not use a card to pretend to be someone else or another company. A QR code is only a picture of its contents, so anyone who prints a different code on a card can point it somewhere else, which is worth remembering if you scan a code on a card from a stranger.

About this business card maker

What we store, and for how long

Business cards hold names and contact details, so here is exactly what happens to them.

• If you only design and download: your cards stay in your browser and are not saved on our server.
• If you save a batch: the card text, settings and image addresses are stored under a random public link. You are asked to confirm first. Guest batches are removed automatically after [180] days without changes. Batches owned by logged-in users are kept.
• Your photos and logo: an image from your device, including headshots added in bulk, is not stored on the server unless you are signed in and it is saved to the Media Library. Otherwise it works on your screen and in your downloads, but is left out of a saved batch. Large numbers of device images are not uploaded automatically.
• In your browser: the key that lets you edit a saved batch is kept in your browser’s local storage on your device.

Anyone with a public link can view and print a batch. Shared batch pages are set not to appear in search results, but do not save details you would not want a stranger with the link to see. You can keep the CSV file instead.

Honest limits

A batch can have up to [200] different cards. Layouts are fixed, so there is no free-form layout editor, and each batch has one style and one size. Fonts are the standard fonts on your device, so we do not offer custom or web fonts. Images from other websites can show on screen, but they only go into downloads if that website allows it, so use images from your device or your own site. A QR code holds a limited amount of text, and a printed code should always be test-scanned. We design and prepare cards, and we do not print or ship them. We would rather you know that now than find out at the print shop.