Design a business card that prints at the right size

Because two regions standardised independently and neither has any reason to change. 90 × 54 mm is the size used across Malaysia, Singapore, China, Japan and Australia, and it is the one to pick if your cards will mostly be handed out here. 85 × 55 mm is the European and UK standard, and it is close to the ISO ID-1 size that bank cards use, which is why it fits neatly in a wallet slot. North America uses a third size again, 3.5 × 2 inches, which is roughly 89 × 51 mm — noticeably shorter than both. The difference sounds trivial written down and is not in the hand: a 90 mm card in an 85 mm cardholder either will not go in or sticks out, and a 54 mm card in a 55 mm pocket slides around. Pick the size your contacts carry, not the one your design software defaults to.

Trim is where the card is meant to be cut — the 90 × 54 mm line. Bleed is artwork extended past that line, usually by 3 mm on every side, so that a cut landing slightly outside the trim still lands on your design instead of on bare paper. Safe area is the opposite margin, a few millimetres inside the trim, where text has to stay so that a cut landing slightly inside does not shave the top off your job title. Both exist for the same reason: commercial cutting is not precise. A guillotine cuts a stack of several hundred sheets at once and the stack shifts as the blade goes through, so a millimetre of variation is normal and no printer treats it as a fault. On this page the safe area is drawn as a dashed line on screen and is never printed — a guide that prints is a guide that ends up on five hundred cards.

Because on the sheet the cards touch. They are laid edge to edge on purpose, so that one cut through a shared line trims two cards at once and the sheet needs half as many cuts. But a card’s bleed area is the space just outside its trim line, and on a butted sheet that space is its neighbour’s artwork. There is nowhere for it to go. This is the honest trade-off of printing your own: butted sheets are efficient and easy to trim, and they cannot bleed. If your design has a background colour or photograph that runs to the edge, print the single-card view with bleed switched on and send that to a print shop, or accept a white border on the sheet by keeping the background inside the trim.

Dpi here is not a property of your file — it is the number of pixels your image has, divided by the number of inches it will be printed across. A logo 300 pixels wide printed 25 mm (about one inch) wide is 300 dpi. The same file printed 50 mm wide is 150 dpi, and at 150 dpi the edges of letters and curves start to look soft or slightly stepped on paper, even though they looked perfect on the screen you designed on. 300 dpi is the threshold most print shops ask for. This page shows the effective resolution of your logo and background at their printed size and warns when it falls below that, so you find out now rather than when the box arrives. If your logo is only available as a small web image, get the original vector or a large export before printing; there is no way to add detail that was never in the file.

Three things have to be true, and the third is the one people miss. First, the design has to be defined in real units — every dimension on this page is written in millimetres, never pixels, because a CSS pixel is 1/96 of an inch and 90 mm does not divide into a whole number of them. Second, the page margins have to be part of the content rather than a browser setting, which is why each sheet carries its own padding; Chrome’s print dialog has a Margins control that overrides margins set in CSS, and it remembers whatever you last used. Third — and this is on you — the print dialog’s Scale must be at 100% or "Default", not "Fit to page", and the paper must be set to A4. Then measure between the outer cut marks. The tool tells you what that distance should be; if your ruler disagrees, the dialog scaled the page and nothing else you do will fix it.

Less than fits. A card has roughly the area of two postage stamps and it is read once, briefly, usually while someone is doing something else. The job of the card is to answer "who was that and how do I reach them", not to describe your services. In practice that means a name, a role, the company, and one or two contact routes you will actually answer — a mobile number and an email, or an email and a website. An office landline you never pick up, a fax number, four social handles and a full postal address are the lines that make everything else smaller. If you genuinely need to say more, the back of the card is the place, and even then one line beats five. The test is simple: hold the finished card at arm’s length and see whether the name is the first thing you read. If it is not, something else on the card is competing with it.

A back is worth having if it carries one thing: a logo, a tagline, a QR code you generated elsewhere, or a language version of the front. It is not worth having as a second front. Turn it on here and it prints as its own A4 sheet, because paper has two sides and the only way to print the second one is to feed the same sheet through again — reload the printed sheet and print page two, or use your printer’s duplex setting. The card block is centred on the sheet on both axes, which is deliberate: flipping the paper on either edge maps the block exactly onto itself, so the backs land on the fronts. Consumer duplex registration still drifts by about a millimetre, so a back design that relies on lining up precisely with the front is a design that will disappoint you. Print one sheet and hold it to the light before you commit.

Print one at home first, at 100%, and cut one card out. Then check five things on the physical object. Spelling — read the phone number and email digit by digit, out loud, from the printed card and not from the screen, because you have read the screen version so many times that your eye now corrects it. Size — measure the trimmed card against a card already in your wallet. Contrast — read the small print at arm’s length in ordinary indoor light, not at your desk. Margins — confirm nothing important sits within a few millimetres of the edge. And the logo — look at its edges closely for softness, which is the symptom of an image below 300 dpi. Then, if you are ordering commercially, ask the printer for their bleed and safe-area requirements and a proof, and check the proof against the same five points. Every one of these is cheap now and expensive in a box of five hundred.

It is saved, and it does not leave your device. The card stays in this browser’s local storage as you work, so closing the tab by accident does not cost you the afternoon — your logo and background image are resized in the browser and kept with it the same way. Nothing is uploaded: the whole page is static files and the card is drawn by your own browser, so there is no server for it to be sent to. "Start a blank card" deletes the stored design, and so does clearing your browser data. One honest note: the site serves Google ads, which are a third-party request like on any ad-supported page — they never see what you type, and they are hidden from the printed sheet.

Because your browser already makes better PDFs than a JavaScript library can, and a print shop can tell. A PDF library is around 40 KB of code to download and draws text as shapes, so the result cannot be selected, searched or copied, and some pre-press tools handle those outlines badly. Print and choose "Save as PDF" and you get a real A4 document with real text and real vector edges. It also keeps this page small, which is the reason the tools here load as fast as they do.