Business Cards are an important part of your corporate image. Many times, I find small businesses try to save money on printing their business cards by designing and printing them themselves, which can be a big mistake…

Your business card is the visual reminder of you and your company. By designing your business card yourself (if you’re not a designer), you can end up designing something that is more pleasing for you than your clients. By not following some specific guidelines when designing the business card, you will not be able to send the file to a professional printer. Important factors and terms you may hear are “bleeds”, “PMS colours”, “margins” etc- all these contribute to the output of a professionally designed card.

I once had a client who designed their own business card in Microsoft Publisher and sent me the file for printing. First of all, I don’t know any designers (professional designers, that is) who use Microsoft Publisher to design anything, let alone business cards! This meant our designer had to re-build the card from scratch which meant the client had just wasted 2 hours of their time for absolutely no reason.

Many printing houses will not work with the general public. Our printer, for example, regularly turns down jobs from people who found their website. I once asked my contact there why she would refuse business? Her answer made complete sense: when people (not businesses) contact her for a quote, they are usually looking for small quantities, like 250 business cards, maybe 500. Small quantities always cost more to print, as printing houses benefit from economies of scale- the more you do, the less it costs to do. This results in small printing job quotes being higher than they need to be. By dealing only with businesses, the printing house takes on more than one job from that company, so both the company (and hopefully) the end client benefits from lower printing costs. These savings are passed down to the clients; at least they are with our firm!

In short, I suggest to try and save money elsewhere in your business, but definitely NOT in your marketing and corporate image… remember: you only have one chance to make a first impression.

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