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Tuesday, July 24, 2012

How to Make a Business Card in Five Easy Steps




Branding and identity design junkies, rejoice! Since we're making the month of June as You The Designer's Logo Design Month, we're going to teach you how to make your own business card. We'll walk you through a five-step process, which you can modify later on and apply your own design concept.

Here's how it will look when we're done:



It's just a simple design, but you know what they say about designing stuff – less is better.


So let's begin our tutorial by downloading the following tutorial assets:



Tutorial Assets:

Since we are doing a print-ready business card (with bleeds and margins), download a PSD file of a Standard Business Card (2″ x 3.5″) at Uprinting’s Free Template page.

After downloading the business card template, let's get the font that we'll be using on our design. You can get the font from DaFont here, and make sure to install the font on your computer.



After that's done and good, let's move to the tutorial proper:

Step 1:
Open the PSD file that you have downloaded, here's what you'll see.


Business Card Tutorial Image 01


Turn off the two layers by clicking the green and red colored eye on the layer panel


Business Card Tutorial Image 02


Press CTRL+ ; to hide/show the guide and this is what you'll come up





Step 2:
Now that we are all set up let's start to design the front of the business card.

On the layer panel, double click the layer named "Background" and name it to Front Background then hit OK. Double click the same layer again and you'll end up in the "Layer Style" window. Click the Color Overlay to color the white background with black (which is #0c0c0c) and hit OK.




Step 3:
Press "T" for the type tool, and start typing your desired business name.

I named my business "Design Studio" and used Cleanvertising (light) font from DaFont, this is what it will look like:




For the orange colored text I used the color similar to our blog’s logo which is #d34d27 to give the business card’s logo more visual appeal. Also, I've added three orange lines above the letter "o" on the word "studio". These 3 orange lines are just 3 commas from the same font, I just flipped it horizontally.




I also added a tagline underneath the word studio, you could just substitute the tagline with whatever you like.

Now your design should look like this:




Save the file as "Front_Design" (CTRL+SHIFT+S)


Step 4:
Now that we're done with the front side, this time we’ll do the back part’s design. Just repeat Step 1 until you end up with a white background.

On the toolbar on the left side, select the "rectangle tool"




and draw a thin strip of line just like this:




Now, right click that layer and select Blending Options, then choose Gradient Overlay and follow these settings.







Now your design should look like this:





Step 5:
This time we need to place the logo from the card’s front design to the our current canvas.

Open Front_Design PSD and position your two sides like this:




Go to the Layers panel and group all the text layers and name it as "logo" then drag the folder to the window like this:




Place it on the left side, make it smaller (CTRL+T) and change the color of the word "studio" and your tagline to gray (which is #666666)




Now add more text, this time I used Calibri for the font




And there you have it!




You can also download the PSD file for the front and back designs here:


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