Business card # 1 - The Tip Kit

In today's tutorial we'll be creating a simple, yet beutiful business card. Simplicity is a key to a good business card, but it wouldn't be much of a tutorial, would it ? :) So we'll try to do some advanced stuff, but still keep the design pretty simple. Here's what we'll be making:

Preparation

First, you need a template for the business card. You can create a new document of a size you need plus 6 mm to both dimensions for the bleed. Alternatively, you can download one of the templates below:

88x55 mm
90x50 mm

I'll be working with the latter. If you open any of these templates in Photoshop, here's what you'll see:

As you can see, there are 2 vertical and 2 horizontal lines and a layer, called bleed area. Sometimes when you print a picture, the printer leaves a white stripe on the edges. To avoid this unwanted effect, a bleed is introduced to the document. With a bleed the document becomes larger than it originally should be. The original document is a rectangle, formed by the 4 guides near the edges. Everything outside of these lines is called a bleed area. Whatever you paint there is supposed to be cut off by the printer, so no important stuff must exceed outside of these lines. Alternatively, if you tried to color the background layer with a different color, you'd get this view:

As you can see, there's a white margin with the text bleed area on all sides. That's the content of the bleed area layer. Why do you need it? You need it when creating the actual graphics to see how it would actually look like. With this layer disabled you see the entire document even with the parts that will be cut off by the printer. Enabling the bleed area layer gives you a better look at what the printer will cut. But despite the fact the bleed area will be cut, your graphics should be placed over the entire document, but the important stuff should be located in the black rectangle you see in the picture above. So basically all the stuff that makes the background can exceed the bleed margins, but other graphics, like text or logos cannot. When you print this document, you'll disable the bleed layer. If you are annoyed by the bleed margin guides (the lines), you can disable them by unchecking the View > Extras in the menu.

Printing

There are two things to know before printing this card:
a) You need to disable the bleed area layer, since it's only a design time guide.
b) You need to convert the document to CMYK color mode. You can also convert to CMYK before starting to design your graphics, but then the colors will look slightly different than in the default mode so if you want to make a graphic that looks great on screen as well, you should work in RGB and only before printing temporarily convert to CMYK. To convert to CMYK color mode, you have to select Image > Mode > CMYK Color. You will notice a color change after doing this. So i'd recommend to work with these templates as they are, save the final result, make a copy of the file and convert the copy to CMYK. That way you won't lose your original RGB document. You can also temporarily convert the original document, but you might forget to convert it back and save it as it is :) You should only work in CMYK from the start if you don't plan to use this graphics in digital format (that is if you only need it for print).

External resources

For this tutorial, we'll be needing one texture from cgtextures. Download it from here. I've downloaded the medium size for the 90x50 mm card.

The tutorial

Let's begin with our tutorial. First thing you need to do after opening one of the template cards is selecting the background layer and coloring it with black. Press D for default color values and ALT+BACKSPACE to fill with black:

As you can see, i keep my bleed area visible, but i tend to enable/disable it during various design stages. Disabling it will show you how the entire document looks like, enabling - how the printed card will look like. Create a new layer above background. This is where you'll need to temporarily disable the bleed area, because we're creating a background for our card - something that has to extend even outside of the bleed guides. Create a selection like this:

Now press D and X to set foreground to white and ALT+BACKSPACE to fill the selection with white:

Hit CTRL+T to enter transformation mode, right-click on the document and choose Skew from the popup menu. You need to grab the middle top and middle bottom handles and position them as follows:

When you're done, go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur... and apply a 140-150 pixel blur:

Next, grab a big soft brush (i used a 700 px size), create a new layer below bleed area and click once on the bottom left corner like this:

This will create a soft white circle like that:

Decrease the opacity of the current layer to 60-70 percent. You can name this layer highlight 2 and the lower one highlight 1 for the sake of clarity. Here's what you should have so far:

Next, we'll be creating some text. Create a new layer below bleed area and grab the text tool

from the tools palette. Use the settings below:

Set the foreground to white and write your company name:

Duplicate this layer (CTRL+J) and change the color of the lower layer's text to black. Now select the upper text layer, hit CTRL+T to transform, right-click and choose Skew. Grab the left middle handle and drag to get a result like this:

Now don't panic! You should be seeing the black text, but there isn't any on the picture above. That's because i've disabled that layer, but it should be there. Next thing you'll do is right click on the black text layer and choose Rasterize Type. Then press CTRL+T, right-click, choose Skew and transform the black text exactly the same as your white text. But have in mind - don't press ENTER when you're done! Instead, right-click and choose Distort. Then click on the top middle handle and distort the black text as follows:

Now blur the text a little. To do that, go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur... and apply a 2-3 pixel blur. Also change the opacity of black text layer to about 50%. Select both text layers and with, the help of the move tool

from the tools palette, position them on the highglightlike this:

Create a new layer below bleed area and grab the text tool

from the tools palette. Set these options:

Write your company credentials:

CTRL+T that layer, right-click and choose Skew. By dragging the middle handles, create a shape like this:

I've noticed that the text was a little too big so i've changed the font size to 24 px instead of 30 px and aligned the credentials with the company name by moving both company name layers. Just do whatever works for you, but keep the company name in the highlight area like this:

Enable the bleed area temporarily and make sure that your texts are not inside it. If so, move them away from the bleed margins. Also make sure you leave some space between the bleed margins and the text. Create a new layer below bleed area and write your own credentials. I've used 30 px text for the name and some lower value for qualifications:

Once again, enable the bleed area and make sure no graphics (except the background) overlap with it:

Create a new layer below bleed area and name it texture. Paste the graphics from the resource link, given in External resources section. Press CTRL+T to resize-position the texture the way you like it:

Press CTRL+SHIFT+U to desaturate the texture and set its blending mode to Multiply:

Now let's add some layer styles to the texts. First double-click the company name text layer (the white one) and add the following gradient overlay:

Here's a minor change to the company name text you've just made:

Now add a gradient overlay on the company credentials text layer:

And one for your credentials:

Here's what you have so far:

And we're almost done. The last thing to do is some color adjustment. To do that, select the layer blow bleed area and press the new adjustment layer button

in the layers panel. From the popup menu select Hue/Saturation. In the Hue/Saturation dialog click on the Colorize checkbox and move the Hue slider to get the base color of your card. Move the Saturation slider to adjust the intensity of the color. Here's some possible variations: