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Terry de Guia

Terry de Guia is a marketing assistant for UPrinting and Digital Room. She enjoys good conversations, coffee breaks, marketing books, reading greeting cards, browsing through flyers and posters, and finds joy in exploring the beauty of nature. She is an avid traveler and a voracious reader.

Business Cards Design tips can be found at U Printing: Business Cards Printing Services
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8 Simple and Easy to Implement Design Tips for your Business Cards

Business Cards Design

Terry de Guia

February 12, 2008


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More than anything else, your business cards design should establish your business brand. The values and identity of your business may be complex and difficult to translate to anything concrete, much less a small card, but doing so will help differentiate you from other businesses.

1. Translate values into colors

Find colors that best evoke the values you want your image to hold. Warm colors appeal to the senses they are generally associated with action, liveliness, and passion. Cool colors like the phrases cool logic and cool minded is associated more with logic, stability, and compliance.

2. Work with Grids

There are proportions that simply look good. Invoke a simplified golden ratio with the rule of thirds. Simply divide your card in 3x3 grids that make nine boxes. Use this as a guideline to create the right proportions for your design. When necessary, divide your grids in half or thirds to make even more guides.

3. Create Balance

Perfectly symmetrical designs maybe boring, but creating asymmetrical balance may be intimidating. Just remember balance is about the perceived weight of objects from visual clues such as colors, size, shadows, and quantity. For example a big object on the left side can be balanced by a number of small objects on the right.

4. Never Upstage Your Content

It can be tempting to overdo the design and fill the background with different colors. Remember though that the most important aspect of your business card is the content. When tempted, go back to the rule of thirds. Two-thirds should contain content, one third can hold your illustration or picture.

5. Use one to three colors.

Except for photographs, it’s difficult to create unity with more than three colors. It may result in discordant scheme where colors are neither contrasting nor similar to your dominant color. If you want a full colored card, work with gradients or use similar colors. Of course you can use different shades of each color.

6. Colorful cards should follow a color scheme

Work the classics and you won’t go wrong. You can use a triadic color scheme that uses three equally spaced colors in the color scheme like green, purple, and orange. You can also use a split complimentary color scheme that has one contrasting color and two similar colors. This will give you a striking design.

7. Use a maximum of three fonts.

Like colors, too many fonts will make your design confusing. Minimize the use of fonts to three. Stylish fonts like scripts should be used sparingly and only when the rest of the fonts are bland. If you already have design elements and colors incorporated into your card, be sure you use simple fonts in like Arial, and those in the Sans Serif family.

8. Get Inspiration


Find a collection of business cards design which you can use to inspire you. Use the same color scheme or follow the layout. Of course, it goes without saying that you can use the principles behind the card that inspired you and tweak it for your own business.


                   



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