Style and Layouts

First and foremost, know your audience.  If you are in a professional services field, such as financial
advising, legal or medicine, conservative style leads the way.  Creative fields or sales can be more
progressive or free flowing.
Especially on business cards, there is a small amount of space to convey a large amount information,
your design can often say more than words.

Let The Content By Your Guide

As a rule of thumb, only use two fonts.  Sometimes you can get away with three, but the more you use,
more cluttered and less thoughtful it appears.  In our layouts, we pre-format cards with the following fields:

Company Name
Full Name
Title
Address Lines 1 & 2
Telephone
Fax
Email
Website
Slogan

Title is the most important line.  It should be the first to read, and the last to forget. This is generally the
company name or yours, if you are an independent professional.  You can use your primary font, and can
be any type, serif, sans serif, script of decorative.  It should be largest.  Steer clear of using modifiers,
if you can.

Author or Name Line, is the second most important.  It should be next to catch the eye and be the second
largest. You can bold the line, but avoid making it italic, it’s generally a subjugating modifier.

Body text such as phone numbers, addresses, email and url’s fall into this category. The most important
attribute they should have is legibility.  Typically, they should have the smallest font size on the card,
generally around 8 points. Since they aren’t attention grabbers, it’s best to use a serif or sans serif font
without any modifier.

Slogan and title lines are kind in between. They are body text but do emphasize either the Company
or Name. Try using your body text font, with a modifier.

Layouts

We have pre-formatted layouts in the most popular styles that thirty years of experience can provide. You
aren’t limited to those of course, and you can move text and graphics and arrange them to best suit your needs.

Margins

The dashed blue line that you see, represents a print margin.  We recommend that nothing exceed this limit.
Objects that are too close to the border will appear very poorly on the finished product.

Alignment & Justification

Aligning objects to the margin provides excellent results, you can use the tools provided to align object to
the top, center, bottom and/or left, center and right.  All together, there are nine cardinal points,
and when used as a reference, can help insure that your layout is clean and precise.

Be consistent in regards to justification. Typically, left justifying objects aligned to the left, right justifying
objects aligned right, etc... provides the best readability.

Formatting Phone Numbers, Addresses, URLs and Email.

Phone numbers, still require some annotation, to designate phone, fax, or mobile numbers.
Any way that you choose to format that works, as long as you remain consistent.  

P: (408) 555-1234 

F: (408) 555-4321

Mixing and matching is poor formatting

P: (408) 555-1234 

F: 408-555-4321

Make addresses post friendly and set it up as you would if for the post office.

URL’s and web addresses are fairly self-explanatory, and don’t need to be annotated. Furthermore,
url’s can be fairly long, so removing unnecessary syntax, like the ‘http://’ and sometimes even the
‘www’, provides more room, and improves the appearance.

Rule of thumb, it’s important to keep in mind that a good layout is about balance. Overfilling, or
making the text too large is just as bad as making the text too small to read.