Whether your card is cardboard, plastic, metal or fabric, a decent print job is essential to give that professional look. It’s no good having a cutting edge design if nobody can read your contact details when they need to.
Just about any hard surface can carry a print and from looking at business card designs that never worked, I think most of them have been tried already. I bought some off the internet once that cost me $45 for 200 cards. The site went on about quality and clarity of their print I decided to give them a try. I was most disappointed when my card arrived. The printing was blurry and wasn’t sharp or clear at all. The card cutting was also loose with threads sticking out of the edges of the card. Not good at all. That’s what you get for getting a ‘budget’ printer to do it for you. The company was supposed to be in the US, but the box was postmarked Singapore!
The overall quality of the card as well as the eye-catching design and clever wording is important. Business card printing needs to be sharp as there isn’t much space to work with. Fitting a decent amount of information into a small space is an exercise in itself. The font needs to be of a size large enough to be clearly read, but small enough that you can fit all the pertinent information onto it.
If in doubt you can print them yourself on a decent home printer. The Dpi of the printer needs to be enough that it can drop ink onto cardboard and remain sharp. Many of the cheaper printers will smudge or be too weak to handle the cardboard, if you are using it. I use an Epson D6600 and it handles the printing and the card perfectly well. The built in software even has an application that will fill an A4 sheet of it with as many cards as possible while still printing double sided.
If you want to use something other than cardboard then you would be better served getting a professional to print it for you. The raw materials can be quite expensive and a home printer won’t be able to print on many of the options open to a print studio. Plastics, fabrics or metal are certainly some of the materials in common use in cards today that you probably won’t be able to do yourself. Some printers give off too much heat to be able to print on plastic properly, or the heads can’t penetrate the plastic enough to get an image to imprint.
So as a general rule of thumb, check the quality of your printer either the commercial kind, or the connected to your PC kind. If you are using different materials, then definitely get a professional to do it for you. Your card is your brand so do it properly. The better you present yourself and your business, the more people are likely to trust it and you.
Filed under: Business Cards
Trackback Uri