Why Prepress Deserves an Hour of Your Time

Business cards are the smallest thing you will ever design and the most likely to be judged in the hand. A card with a shaved-off edge, a logo sitting a whisker from the trim, or a blue that looked rich on screen but prints as a washed-out purple does more damage than no card at all. Printers are not being awkward when they ask for a properly prepared file: their presses run whatever you send, mistakes included. Getting the technical side right takes an hour and saves you a reprint, an uncomfortable conversation and a dent in your margin.

Start with the Right Document Size

The standard UK business card is 85mm × 55mm, though square formats, rounded corners and the slim 85mm × 40mm card are all common. Set up your document with three areas in mind from the very first click:

• Trim size — the finished card, 85mm × 55mm.
• Bleed — 3mm on every edge, giving an artwork area of 91mm × 61mm.
• Safe margin — 3mm minimum inside the trim line, 5mm if you want the layout to breathe.

Build at final size rather than scaling later. Resizing artwork at the end of a job is the most common route to clipped text, stretched logos and a file that has to be rebuilt from scratch.

Bleed: Extend, Don't Guess

Bleed exists because paper moves. When the guillotine cuts a stack of cards, it works to a tolerance of roughly half a millimetre, and the printed sheet may have stretched or shrunk slightly on press. Any colour, image or pattern that reaches the edge of the card must therefore run a full 3mm past the trim line. Touching the line is not enough — it will leave a sliver of white when the cut drifts inward.

Extend backgrounds, full-bleed photographs and coloured panels to the bleed edge, then export with crop marks and bleed included. If your printer supplies a PDF preset or a template, use it rather than rolling your own. Check, too, that no crucial element sits in the bleed area expecting to survive: anything outside the trim line is destined for the offcut bin.

Margins and Safe Zones

Guillotines are accurate but never perfect, and a 0.5mm shift is entirely normal. Anything placed within 2mm of the trim line risks being shaved or simply looking visually off-centre once the cards are stacked together. Keep all text, logos and fine detail comfortably inside the safe zone.

Borders deserve special care. A thin frame drawn close to the trim will look uneven the moment the cut drifts, so draw borders at least 5mm in from the edge and keep them reasonably thick. Likewise, avoid placing contact details tight to a corner — corner rounding, if you have ordered it, bites further into the artwork than you might expect.

Colour: Profiles, Conversion and Black

Commercial litho and digital printing work in CMYK. If your brand palette arrived as RGB hex values, convert it deliberately rather than letting the printer's software make the decision for you. Bright greens, vivid oranges and deep saturated blues shift most; check them against a printed proof or a swatch book before committing.

• Coated stock — use a coated CMYK profile, such as FOGRA39, for silk, gloss and matt laminated cards.
• Uncoated stock — colours sit duller and ink spreads slightly, so use an uncoated profile and expect a softer result.
• Small black text — set it as 100 per cent K only. Four-colour black on 6pt type will look fuzzy and may misregister.
• Large solid black areas — a rich black such as 40C/30M/30Y/100K gives depth, but ask your printer for their preferred mix.
• Reversed-out text — white type on a dark panel fills in slightly, so keep it above 7pt and avoid hairline weights.

If you are specifying foil, embossing or a spot colour, place it on its own named layer or as a separate spot channel so the printer can see exactly what is intended.

Resolution, Fonts and Fine Lines

Images need 300 pixels per inch at the final printed size, which is smaller than most people assume for a card. A photograph that looks crisp at 100mm wide may be far too low in resolution once dropped into a 91mm × 61mm document. Line art and logos benefit from 600 to 1200 ppi if they contain fine detail.

Embed your fonts or outline them before exporting — never rely on the printer having your typefaces. Keep line weights above 0.25pt, since anything finer tends to break up on press, and check that white or light hairlines on a dark background will actually hold. Supply artwork as a print-ready PDF, ideally PDF/X-4, with fonts embedded, images at the correct resolution and colour converted.

A Final Check Before You Upload

Run through this list every time, even on a repeat order:

• Document set to 85mm × 55mm with 3mm bleed on all sides.
• All edge-to-edge artwork extended fully into the bleed.
• Nothing important within 3mm of the trim line.
• CMYK throughout, with the correct profile for the chosen stock.
• Small text in 100 per cent K only; rich black reserved for large areas.
• Images at 300 ppi or better at final size; fonts embedded.
• Spellcheck the phone number, email and postcode twice — printers cannot fix those for you.

Do this and your cards will arrive sharp, evenly trimmed and true to the colour you intended. Your printer will thank you, your client will trust you, and the next job will be easier because you already know the file is sound.