Free Business Card Maker

The standard business card size

The card here is 85 by 55 millimetres, the size printers expect across Europe, Africa, Australia and most of Asia. North America uses 3.5 by 2 inches, which is 89 by 51 millimetres: close enough that a design survives the change, but different enough that a print shop will ask, so check before you order.

Both sides are designed together. The front carries who you are and how to reach you; the back carries your business name, logo and a short line about what you do.

Bleed, trim and the safe area

Print shops print several cards on one large sheet and cut them apart. No cutter is perfectly exact, so anything that runs to the edge of the card, such as a coloured background or a stripe, has to extend a few millimetres past the cut line. That extra margin is the bleed, and without it a slightly off cut leaves a thin white sliver along one edge.

The PDF adds a 3 mm bleed to every side automatically and extends edge-to-edge colour into it, then marks the cut lines with crop marks outside the card. Text is kept at least 4 mm inside the edge, the safe area, so a cut that strays does not clip a phone number.

What to put on a business card

Less than you think. Your name, your role, one phone number, an email address and a website cover almost every reason someone keeps a card. A street address is worth including if people visit you; otherwise it crowds the details people actually use.

Leave any line empty and the others close up, so a card without a website does not have a gap where it would be. The tagline on the back works best as one short sentence about what you do, not a slogan.

Sending it to a print shop

Download the PDF with the print shop option on. It holds the front and back as two pages, with real text in embedded fonts, which is what printers ask for. Ask for a heavy card stock, 350 gsm is common, and choose matte if people will write on the cards or gloss if colour matters most. Order a small run first and check every number on the proof: a typo on 500 cards is expensive.

Printing at home

Turn the print shop option off to get a PDF at the exact card size, with no bleed or marks. Print it on card stock of around 300 gsm at full size, not "fit to page", and cut with a guillotine or a craft trimmer rather than scissors. Home printing is fine for a handful of cards; for a box of them, a print shop is cheaper per card and the edges will be cleaner.

Your details stay on your device

The card is drawn and the PDF is built inside your browser. Your name, contact details and logo are saved only in this browser on this device, so you can come back and edit the card later, and nothing is sent to any server.