Make Your Own Business Cards

This article is a tutorial of some sort and it will guide you through designing your business cards from the beginning to the end. This article is a response to the readers that ask me about which printing company to choose, what paper should they use to print they’re cards, what shape, how much it takes for the actual package to arrive and other questions among these lines.

The Printing Company

One of the most important steps in this business card designing experience is choosing the right printing company. Now, there are a number of great companies to choose from, buy I have chosen for this project the one I used before and was very happy with it, and that is Moo.com. They are based in United States but they have a UK subsidiary. The two branches function as two separate identities and it’s best to choose the one that’s next to you.

We are based in Europe, so the logical choice was to choose the one based in the United Kingdom. Let me clarify something. Whether you choose the United States or UK, you get the same thing, the same interface, the same options. The differences mainly refer to handling of your finished product and shipping time.

Choosing the type of business card

Now that I choose the company, it was time to think about what business card model I want. These choices don’t seem like much but they’re quite important. You don’t want to overlook a detail that could hurt the first impression you get from shouwing or giving your card to a business contact.

Moo offers quite a few models of cards. You can go with classic business cards, which are the normal size, quality paper and printing. Besides this option you can go with rounded corners business cards, gloss business cards or the amazing luxe business cards. The last options is the absolute maximum quality you can get from your business cards. At triple the weight and thickness of most business cards, Moo luxe business cards are guaranteed to make a premium impression. You can also find two great new types of cards, and that’s the Facebook card, which is pretty much self-explanatory and the MiniCards which are basically a smaller version of card.

Designing the Business Cards

Once I made up my mind about the type of card I could go ahead with the actual design. If you would don’t like to actually make your own business cards, and by that I mean you don’t want to take care of the designing part, you can choose a business card template made by the designers at Moo.

The whole process is extremely simple and can be included in 3 steps :

Upload your own images/artwork or choose from their business card designs.
Personalize with your details.
Moo will print, hand-pack and deliver your Rounded Corner Business Cards to your door!

At this point you have 2 choices : the first choice is to go the classic way including text and some images you designed, or photos on your business cards or the second choice is text only, kind of a minimalistic approach.

I went for the first option as I needed to include a photo of my office in my design.

Moo allows you for this classic, image and text setup to use a different image for the backside if each business card. So, if you choose a pack of 100 business cards, you can have 100 different backsides. You can upload each one of these images separately or import them from your Facebook, Flickr, Etsy, Picasa or SmugMug account.

The Moo business card design interface is very intuitive. It handles the edges by itself so you can focus on the important thing, and that is the design.

The first option you need to take a look is the layout of the card and you have three possible options : text only, text and image and full image. According to which option you choose the business card template changes.

My option was as you can see in the preview below, text and image with the image situated in the top area of the business card.

The second think you need to choose is the background color and third add one or more images in your design. The actual text of the business card is edited directly in the preview template. Each line of text can have it’s own font, color and size, giving you many design options.

By playing around with the simple, yet effective options I came up with the card below. You cay notice a dental chair and office in the card below. That is because, oddly enough that is my actual job, I’m a doctor of dental medicine. I do design and maintain this blog as a hobby. Anyway that is less important. Let’s continue.

The next step in the process is the design of the backside of the business card. Here the options are more basic. You just upload your images and using the movement and rotation controls you position them on the backside.

The last step is the verification. The verification is made by checking 3 check boxes, each one instructing you to verify a certain aspect of the business card.

Before the checkout you have a few more options for your business cards :

Paper type : classic, green (eco friendly) and luxe. We talked about this at the beginning of the article. Luxe is the best you can have and the other two options are self-explanatory.
Corners : classic or rounded
Finish : matte and gloss
Number : minimum of 50, maximum of 8000.

Following these selections, there’s the check out process and this is pretty much standard, with the possibility of paying through Paypal and credit cards and using a discount code.

That’s about it. You will receive in your email your order details and you will be notify when your business cards have left towards you. Also you can follow your order status at any time in your Moo account.

The Package

Shipping time depends on what delivery option you have chosen. I opted for standard delivery and the business cards arrived in about 1 week. The packaging was really beautiful also.

The business cards are nicely packaged in 2 black cardboard boxes. As an extra I ordered an acrylic business cards holder. You can see its packaging in the image above (center).

The End Result

I have to say by holding the actual business cards in my hand that the end result is spectacular. The only regret is that I don’t have a better camera to capture the beauty and detail of these amazing business cards by Moo.com.

Well, that’s about it. Hopefully you found this tutorial helpful. Besides business cards, Moo also offers custom holiday cards and many other great printing products you should check out.

[alert-success] Go make your business cards on Moo.com now.[/alert-success]