Nine visiting card design mistakes to avoid

The recurring nine

In rough order of how often we see them.

• Type below 7pt, which many people genuinely cannot read.
• Every contact channel listed, so none stands out.
• Text pushed to within a millimetre of the trim.
• A logo taken from a website at screen resolution.
• Low-contrast text — grey on white, or light on a photograph.
• A border following the trim line, which advertises any cutting drift.
• No white space at all.
• Decorative typefaces used for a phone number.
• A QR code smaller than 20 mm, which many cameras struggle with.

The single most useful edit

Remove something. Nearly every card sent to us improves by deleting one contact method and increasing the size of what remains.

The specifications this applies to

For reference, here is how it works out on the products this comes up on most often.

• Standard Visiting Cards — 89 × 51 mm finished, 3 mm bleed, 300 DPI minimum, from ₹2 per unit with a minimum of 100.

Ordering

Every file is checked automatically before printing, so a mistake in any of this is caught while it can still be corrected rather than after a run is on paper.

Standard delivery is free to every PIN code in India — two working days to a metro, up to twelve to the islands — and prices include GST, so the figure on the product page is the figure charged. Add a GSTIN at checkout and the invoice carries it for input credit.

Before you send it

Print the design at actual size on an ordinary office printer and look at it on paper rather than on screen. Almost every problem — type too small, contrast too low, something too close to the edge — becomes obvious immediately at real size and is invisible at 200% zoom on a monitor.

Then read it out loud. It is the most reliable way to catch a missing word, and a missing word on 500 printed cards is not a small correction.