Business card # 2 - The Tip Kit

Today we're going to make another simple business card. Here's a preview of what we'll be creating:

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).

The tutorial

OK enough with the preparations - let's get to work. Open up one of the templates, select the background layer, press D to default color values and ALT+BACKSPACE to fill the entire background with black. If a part of your document is white - that's the bleed area. During the design process some of my preview pictures might be with the bleed area enabled and some of them - with the bleed area disabled. You should also constantly enable/disable the bleed area layer to see how the result looks. Step 2 - create a new layer above background and grab the gradient tool

from the tools palette. Use a white-to transparent radial gradien preset as shown below:

Zoom out quite a lot (CTRL+-) to see the entire card and draw a line with the gradient tool as shown in the picture below:

The result you're looking for is something like that:

Next, let's lighten this picture a little. To do that, merge the gradient with the background (select gradient layer and press CTRL+E). Next, hit CTRL+U to bring up the hue/saturation dialog and increase the lightness slider to make the picture lighter:

Now grab the rectangular marquee tool

from the tools palette and draw a selection, similar to this one:

Create a new layer above background and fill this selection with black (D, ALT+BACKSPACE). Here's what you should have (as you can see, the bleed area is disabled in the picture below):

Rename this layer to stripe 1. We're going to create a few more smaller stripes. But first, decrease the opacity of stripe 1 layer to 30%:

After that's done, create a new layer below stripe 1 and name it stripe 2. Draw a selection like this:

Once again, fill it with black (D, ALT+BACKSPACE). After that, align the thinner stripe with the one we made before so that there was no gap between them:

Next, duplicate the stripe 2 layer (CTRL+J). Rename the duplicate to stripe 3 and move it below stripe 2. Move the new stripe itself below the older one (stripe 2):

Change the opacity values to 50% for stripe 2 and 70% for stripe 3 layers. Here's what you'll end up with:

OK let's add the last stripe. Select stripe 3 layer and duplicate it (CTRL+J). Rename the duplicate to stripe 4 and move it below stripe 3. Move the stripe itself below stripe 3 and change its opacity to 90%:

Create a new layer above stripe 1 and grab the text tool

from the tools palette. With the settings below add your name on the first stripe area:

Now i've created 3 thinner stripes, because i wanted to write 3 specialties in them. So if you have a single specialty, you can for example write it on the middle stripe or use only 1 stripe at all. This completely depends on you. These stripes add some life to the card design, but how many of them you're going to use will depend completely up to you. For my current situation, i've used 3. I've used a smaller font (see the picture below) to add 3 more layers of text to the stripes:

To make the text more visually appealing, i've formed a stair-ish shape from the specialties:

Note that the rightmost corner of the texts does not go all the way to the bleed area. You should leave some space between the texts and the bleed guidelines as well. Next we're going to add a logo. Create a logo layer above stripe 1 and paste your personal/company logo on it. Use CTRL+T to resize the logo if it doesn't fit the document. I've added the logo to the top left corner of the card, but if you find a place that looks better - go ahead - be creative :) Depending on how your logo looks and the policy of your company, you might want to blend it into the composition. For example The Tip Kit logo is a blue quad and it doesn't look good in the card at all. But since i don't have any policies regarding color changes in the logo, i can do something about it :) What i've done after positioning the logo on the card was first pressing CTRL+SHIFT+U to desaturate it:

After experimenting further, i've decided to change the blending mode for the logo to pin light. That gave the logo an interesting glassy look:

Remember that your logo might not necessary require to be changed to pin light so scroll through all layer modes and find the one that suits you best. And maybe your logo will not need any changes at all - even better. Next, create a new layer somewhere above the background and write your company name on it with a large font like shown below. Position it below the logo:

And create one more layer with right-aligned text for your company/personal credentials:

And the basic card is finished, let's have a look at it before adding an additional effect:

The only thing left to do is add the glowing thingy that you can see below the stripes in the first picture of this tutorial. To do that, create a new layer directly above background and grabb a gradient tool

from the tools palette. Rename this layer to fx, effect or whatever and use the following settings for your gradient:

Draw a short line on the document to create a small white-to-transparent circle like shown below:

Zoom out until you can see the entire document. Press CTRL+A to select everything on the layer, CTRL+X to cut and CTRL+V to paste it back again. This procedure will position our circle in the middle of the document:

Now press CTRL+T to resize, grab the left (or right) middle handle and, while holding ALT key, drag the handle to form a shape like this one:

Press ENTER to apply. Now select the top part of the white shape like this:

Hit DEL to get rid of it and here's what you should have now:

We now have the first part of our effect. Align it with the bottom stripe:

From this point on, the procedure is simple. Grab the move tool

from the tools palette. Duplicate the current layer by pressing CTRL+E and press the DOWN ARROW on your keyboard 6 times (or more/less if it looks better for you) to move the duplicate down. Here's how it should look after the first pass:

Repeat the duplicate/move procedure many times until you have lots of copies of your fx layer and the card looks similar to this one:

Next, select all the fx layers and press CTRL+E to merge them all together. Now hit CTRL+T: we'll need to distort the bottom part a little. To do that, hold CTRL, ALT, SHIFT keys together and move the bottom left (or right) transformation handle outwards:

Here's how it looks when transformed:

Finally, change the blending mode for the fx layer to overlay and you're done:

That's it for this tutorial. See you next time and until then - have fun and be creative!