Business Card Design Walkthrough

Author: Jan Cavan, Category: Articles, Tutorials

Several months ago, Dawghouse Design Studio held a custom-designed business card giveaway to its readers. Our lucky winner was Greg Pettit of Monkey House, his personal blog about parenthood and family. In this post, I will be giving you a walkthrough on the entire business card design process that I did for them.

Monkey House needed something to brand themselves. Of course, when I thought of initial concepts, I could only think of a monkey illustration. Greg provided me with a couple of monkey head illustrations that he liked and from there, it was fairly easy to understand what he was looking for.

Below you can find the original monkey head sketches that I did. It took me only a few sketches before I came up with something that I really liked.

I scanned the sketch, imported it in Illustrator, traced and did the coloring.

Now to create the actual business card, I created a new document in Illustrator with dimensions 3.625 x 2.125 inches. Since this artwork was set for printing, the color mode of the document was set to CMYK.

The next step was to add the bleed. A bleed is a term in printing that refers to what goes beyong the edge of the document after trimming. The entire artwork should exceed the bleed area so that when the document is trimmed, no thin white areas will be shown. AllBusinessCards, the printing company, required a bleed of 0.125 inch on all four sides leaving the finished business card size to 3.5 x 2 inches.

Now for the design of the business card, I played around with a few ideas before settling for something both Greg and I liked.

On the document, I drew a rectangle using the Rectangle Tool (M) without a border and with a fill of Pantone® color 4975 C. I thought that with a darker background, this would emphasize the monkey illustration more.

I imported the monkey illustration onto the new document and just played around with it. Somewhere along the way, I decided that three monkeys may be better than one, did a little more playing around until I ended up with below.

For the Monkey House typeface, I wanted something that looked playful to match the monkeys yet legible and bold. After a few searches and trials, I finally settled with using Berlin Sans FB Demi.

The last step before sending the final file off to the printer was to convert the text to outlines (Type > Create Outlines). This ensures that the exact same typefaces are used just in case the printing house doesn’t have them.

After a few weeks, the business cards arrived and the final output was exactly how we both wanted it to be. We’re happy of how it turned out!

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