Business Card Generator

How to use Business Card Generator

1. Enter your name, title, company and contact details.
2. Pick a theme and check the preview.
3. Print or save as PDF — add 3 mm bleed before sending to a commercial printer.
4. 85 × 55 mm is the international standard; the US uses 89 × 51 mm.
5. Keep text 4–5 mm inside the trim line and extend backgrounds 3 mm beyond it.
6. Printed colours will differ from screen — check a brand colour against a physical swatch.

Standard sizes differ by country

The international standard is 85 × 55 mm, used across Europe, India and most of Asia. The US and Canada use 3.5 × 2 inches, which is 89 × 51 mm — wider and shorter. Japan uses 91 × 55 mm. A card designed to one size and printed at another gets cropped or leaves white edges, and card holders and wallets are sized for the local standard. Design for where your cards will actually be handed out.

Bleed and safe margins are why cards come back wrong

Printing is cut after it is printed, and the cut is never perfect. Artwork that runs to the edge must extend 3 mm beyond the trim line — the bleed — or a slight misalignment leaves a white sliver. Equally, keep text at least 4–5 mm inside the trim, because a cut that wanders the other way will clip it. Almost every card that comes back from a printer looking wrong failed one of those two rules.

Less information, larger type

A card has one job: let someone contact you afterwards. Name, what you do, one phone number, one email. A postal address is rarely needed, a fax number never, and a QR code linking to a full profile does more than six lines of small print. Keep body text at 8 points or above — below that it is unreadable in poor light, which is where cards are usually read. The back of the card is free space most people waste.

Getting it printed

Send a PDF at 300 dpi in CMYK with bleed included, which is what printers ask for and what most people send incorrectly. Colours will not match your screen — that is the gamut difference, not a printing error — so check a saturated brand colour against a printed swatch before ordering a thousand. Card stock around 350 gsm feels substantial; below 300 feels cheap in the hand, which is a real impression given what the object is for.