Some Print Tips

New Card Design

I’ll admit, I haven’t done a lot of printing. Actually, I have done a lot of printing… just not the sort that involves design. I designed some calling cards for whattheblindsee.com a while back. While I think they looked fairly nice they were extremely impractical from a printing perspective. I submitted my design to uPrinting (a great site for getting things printed cheaply and well) and they kept changing my design. It turns out that I had elements which were entirely too close to the edge. I even tried printing and cropping them at home, which went rather poorly.

The lesson I learned is that printing—like any medium—has it’s limitations. Before you start designing something, you need to learn what those limitations are. There are usually workarounds and tips; it’s a good idea to do some research on them, too. Wireframing can help a lot here, too, because you don’t end up trying to work with complicated elements too early in the design process.

Here’s my current calling card design. It’s basically the same thing as before, but it’s got padding around the outside. I started with a wireframe and built everything into it, after that I went through and added color. Then I more advanced effects like the letterpress on the letters, gradients, etc.