Layout
Making sure that all the elements in your design function as intended, we recommend using one of our standard templates and customising that. You’ll have a good indication for font size and layout. It’s easy to design something on the screen at full zoom only to realise when printed everything is too small to read. We’ve put together a few other tips below to hep you out.
Borders
Putting a border around the edge of your card makes it look great on screen, however in reality, in post production there are some machinery tolerances that could make your borders look uneven. When printing single sided it’s not too much of an issue, however when you print double sided there is some movement on the press between front and back sides due to paper shrinkage & slight machinery movement. As we print your cards on oversize A3 sheets, with 25 per sheet, even 1/3mm of movement can result in borders looking uneven to the eye. If you want the best looking cards, we’d say avoid borders. Stay away from neon looking colours and bright orange, pinks and greens, these are the most effected.
Colour
When designing using our online designer, you will be designing in RGB (red, green, blue) which is made up of light on your screen. When we print, this needs to be converted to CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks). The colours achievable when printing using inks isn’t as vast as the RGB light spectrum you see on your screen. So if your design on screen is using a colour that falls outside the realm of CMYK, it will be converted to the closest CMYL colour and will look different. There isn’t a way around this, it’s just a fact of life that colours will convert when printed in comparison to what you see on screen.
If you want an exact match for your screen, you will need to find a supplier that will do that for you, be prepared for some hefty prices to do so.
Ink Coverage
If you want a card that looks completely black or has a dark black background, we recommend using our Tech Noir business cards. We print these with a vibrant white ink on the surface. Because we print onto a completely black card stock, the sides of your cards are black too. These really give a far better appearance than printing black onto white card. Printing with a heavy black onto white card can cause the edges to flake due to the amount of ink coverage.
We recommend adding lamination when having a full ink coverage on a card to avoid flaking on the edges.
If your colour is heavy, you’ll find it sits on top of the card rather than into the card. There isn’t really a way to avoid this. Make sure you choose the correct material if your are having full coverage otherwise you could end up with a washed out colour when you’re expecting something really vibrant. Take a look at our material usage guide to make sure you have selected the correct substrate. This is your responsibility as we will print what we are given on the material chosen.