A business card is an important attribute of a modern business person. By the look of the business card, potential partners can form an absentee opinion about a person or recall your face-to-face meeting. And it depends on how your business card looks, how informative or concise, convenient or overloaded with unnecessary details, whether the long-awaited contact will happen or whether the partner prefers not to contact the owner of such a piece of paper. If you have taste and patience, you can design your personal business card using Adobe Photoshop.
It is necessary
- a computer;
- photoshop;
- fantasy.
Instructions
Step 1
Before you start developing a business card design, think carefully about what kind of information you want to place on this small paper rectangle, what effect you want to achieve, what kind of mood the business card should carry. The imagination of designers in this area is limitless, however, even the technologies for making business cards exist. a great many - wooden, plastic, metal, rags, etc. - after all, a business card is what makes its owner unforgettable in some way. However, the most popular, easy to manufacture and practical to use are business cards made of thick paper, with a single or multicolored image printed on them. The most popular format of business cards nowadays is 90x50 mm. To make such a business card, open the Adobe Photoshop program. Create a new document File> New (File> New). In the window that opens, set the necessary parameters for the created document:
- size in width (Width) 90 mm, height (Height) 50 mm (if the future business card has a horizontal position)
- Resolution - a very important parameter for the future printing implementation - should have a value of 300 dpi (300 dpi, pixel / inch)
- the color model of the document (Color Mode) - RGB, if you are preparing a file for printing on a household printer or in the center of operational printing. If you are preparing a file of a professional polygraphic level, it is recommended to put the model (CMYK), although often this is unnecessary and only creates confusion.
- you can set the background color of the document (Background Contents) by default to white (White), if basically your business card will keep the color of the paper on which it is supposed to be printed. Or you can leave the background transparent and return to work on it afterwards. Pay attention to whether the correct units of measurement are selected for the fields with dimensions - namely millimeters, not pixels, and dpi, not pixel / centimeter. Check the parameters and click OK, we have a new blank document in front of us.
Step 2
First of all, a business card is a carrier of information about its owner, therefore, we need to make an inscription with your name. For this we will use the Horizontal Type Tool. When you select it, you will see how a strip appeared at the top of the program's working panel with the main parameters of the future inscription: font, its size, color, location, etc. We select the font we need in terms of style. It should be remembered that too complex fonts - stylized as handwritten, ornamental, playful, although they create a mood and entourage, but greatly impair the readability of a business card. You simply run the risk that your business card in a heap of similar ones simply cannot be found, tk. your last name will be unread at a quick glance. So, choose a font that is clear, visible and understandable. The size of the font on a business card, as has traditionally happened, should not be less than 9 points and more than 14 - in order to remain easily visible in not very good lighting or imperfect printing, on the one hand, and on the other, not to look ridiculously large, as in books for preschool children Place the cursor on the required place of our blank document and type the text. Notice that in the list of Layers there is a new text layer with a new caption. You can always return to editing: change the text or move it by selecting this layer in the list and using the appropriate tools of the program. According to the standards of Russian-language etiquette, a person is addressed, first of all, by name and patronymic, so they should be written first, and the last name - the last one. You can highlight the last name by typing it only in capital letters. Enchanting playing with the sizes and styles of fonts on a business card is a sign of bad taste. In general, in order to show that you are ready for cooperation, compliance with agreements and norms of business communication, you must force yourself to comply with the norms and limit you already from the design of the business card. It is allowed to use no more than 2 fonts (not counting the style of the artistically executed font on the logo).
Step 3
Below, under the name of the owner of the business card, you should write his position or profession, as well as the necessary contact information - phone number, address, e-mail, etc. We will use the same Horizontal Type Tool, but now we will slightly change the font parameters: you can reduce its size and, perhaps, change the font face to italic. By the way, in the Window menu you can find the Character item, and open an additional panel, with which you can control various additional font parameters - the distance between letters, line spacing, etc. It is important to remember that an ordinary person, dialing a phone number with his right hand, will hold your business card with two fingers with his left, respectively, for the lower left corner … Of course, the most unfortunate place for contact information is the lower left corner covered with your fingers. Free it if you don't want your business card to look stupid and uncomfortable.
Step 4
You can place a logo or some design element in the part of the business card free from the text. For example, there may be a picture that somehow personifies the owner of the business card or describes his occupation. You can also place a small amount - preferably as concise as possible - information about services or nuances of activities, titles, regalia, uniqueness of the offer, etc. It should be remembered that a business card is not an advertising brochure, it is unlikely that someone will study and research it in detail and repeatedly. To place an image - it can be created separately in Photoshop, found on the Internet or prepared using other programs - it is necessary copy it to the clipboard, then go to our document and paste the contents of the clipboard there via the Edit> Paste command, or by pressing Ctrl + V. In the Layers panel, we see a new layer with the added picture. You can change its location and scale through the menu Edit> Free Transform (Editing> Free Transform), or by pressing the keys Ctrl + T. After these actions, small square pointers will appear around the picture, by moving which you can achieve the desired location and size of the picture.
Step 5
You can change the look of your business card by adding a background - creating a new Solid Color or Gradient layer. This can be done via the Layer> New Fill Layer menu. Next, in the parameters, select one or more required colors. Please note that by default the layer is created as the topmost layer in the list of layers - that is, it lies on top of the previous pictures and inscriptions, closing them. It's okay, you can always move it from the first to the last place in the list, and it will really become the background. You can edit it as many times as you like, just double-click on this layer in the Layers list and select the required combination of colors.
Step 6
It is recommended to save the created business card in two formats: - firstly, in the original format of the Photoshop program, so that you can return to correcting and layer-by-layer editing of our document, this file takes up a little more space, but each of the elements in it - inscriptions, a picture, a background - saved independently and therefore can be independently modified.
- secondly, save the file for transmission to the printing house or the center of the printout. If the file size is critical to you, for example, it needs to be sent by e-mail, and the communication channel is too narrow, then use the popular JPEG format. In the File> Save As menu, select the appropriate item from the list of formats. Then, in the options window that opens, set the slider to the level of the highest image quality, because the size of the business card is small, so small details of the image on it are important, and if the image quality is low, they can be lost. In general, it is recommended to save the picture without loss of quality - for this, the TIFF format is used … It is not very popular, but it does not distort the original image of the image. Save the file in this format by selecting TIFF from the Save As window list. At the same time, do not forget to uncheck the box next to the Save Layers parameter, because the information about what layer was located on is no longer important for printing.
