Create a Grunge Print-Ready Business Card

on Mar 02 in Design by Paul

In this tutorial, I’m going to guide you through the process of creating a grunge print-ready business card using Photoshop. If you need one you can now easily create it with my tutorial and then print your business cards fast using for instance Next Day Flyers services. But let’s first start with some information on how should a good business card look like. Let’s start!

Business Card Preview

Here’s the business card that we’re going to create. It’s simple and readable. I prefer pure black business cards with white text (and maybe a logo in color as well as some simple patterns or ornaments in the background to diversify it) but here I’m going to show you how to create a grunge style business card.


Business Card Dimensions

A standard business card measurement is 3.5 x 2 inches (8.9cm x 5.1cm). There are also some other sizes for different countries but this one is probably the most common one. We will use a bit larger canvas to create it because we need a bleed. The bleed is some extra pixels beyond the original size of the card. We’ll need it because when card is cut it will have exactly 89mm x 51mm. Its edges may remain colored differently (due to imperfect cutting) so to avoid that we’re adding the bleed. The bleed has usually 0.0625 inches.

Step 1

Open up the Photoshop and create a new document with dimensions set to 3.625 x 2.125 inches (3.5 x 2 inches + 0.0625 inches bleed for each edge) and 300 dpi (since it’s for print).

Step 2

Fill the background layer with black using Paint Bucket Tool (G). Go to ‘View -> New Guide…’ and create two guides in the middle of the image (type in 50%). Click in the middle of the image using ‘Horizontal Type Tool (T)’ and type in your name, name of your company or your website address. I used ‘Chubby Cheeks’ as the font. I made it 12 pt. Tagline was created using ‘Myriad Pro’ font and grey color (#888888). Select each layer from this step and group them together. Hide the group.

Business Card Information

Now, it’s time for the front side. The most common information to include here are:

  • Name and surname
  • Who are you?
  • Your email address
  • Your telephone number
  • Your website address (optional)
  • Your address (optional)
  • Short information about you or about your company (optional)

Step 3

So, create a new layer and use ‘Horizontal Type Tool (T)’ to type in any information you consider necessary for your business card. I used five information for this example. I used free font called ‘Eras Light ITC’ for the details and ‘Trebuchet MS’ for my name. I also placed a small ForCG logo in the top-right corner of the card.

Step 4

Add some really soft grey gradient beneath the text layers using ‘Gradient Tool (G)’. I used #e0e0e0 and #f6f6f6 for colors.

Step 5

Finally download some free brushes from Bittbox:

I used them on separate layers with color set to black. After that I changed layer blending modes to ‘Soft Light’ or ‘Overlay’. There are also three brush marks in color. They have ‘Fill’ set to 0% and ‘Color Overlay’ turned on inside layer styles. I ended up with this:

Conclusion

That’s all for now. I hope you learned something new and useful about business cards and I hope you like your newly created one!

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