Tips for Printing Business Cards
Printing of business cards, no matter by yourself or through ordering from printing company, should meet two basic requirements: flawless quality and reasonable price.
In respect of cost such factors as the type of paper used for printing or amount of ink matter much. Blank background makes business cards cheaper, so does thinner card stock. However, it is important not to overdo with saving money. There are many tips how to cut your expenditures without losing quality. Read on to find out the best way to print on a desktop printer. |
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Don’t forget about the Print Quality Settings!
Print quality settings are definitely the last thing to ignore. To make your design correspond to the output, set up the best quality configurations. See print settings for more detail.
Backgrounds, pictures and graphics.
Designing on your own you should keep in mind some technical aspect of printing process. Printers feed mechanism cannot work with perfect accuracy. So, to ensure your background will look great and won’t suffer from inevitable imprecision use paper with small gaps between cards. Placing a picture on your business card, remember not to let it end on the very edge of a card.
Images or Gradient Colors
Glossy paper is perfect option if you decided to print business cards with photo or picture with complex colors on them. Glossy paper in this case will make the output look as you see it on the screen. If glossy paper is not used you may be disappointed by the way the output will look.
Offset on Inkjet Printers. A thing that doesn’t happen with laser printers.
Inkjet printers usually zoom the print output. It causes shift of each next row of cards up or down in accordance with the previous row. By the end of the sheet the offset is about 1 mm.
What to do to solve this problem? Set up Scale field when calibrating and this problem will not bother you.
Printer and Paper type
One of the first things to check about cards stock is whether the paper you are going to use compatible with your printer. Laser printers, for instance, will break if you use paper with magnetic (magnetic business cards) or glossy (glossy business cards) coating.
Printing on Paper Without Gaps between Rows
Most business card stocks don’t specify gaps between cards. Cards follow each other closely, which can entail certain troubles with text and pictures. To avoid printer imprecision when printing on such paper make sure text and graphic are placed 3 mm off the ages of cards.
Printing Images in High Quality
Basically monitor resolution is much lower than the resolution of any printer. It may cause misunderstanding of the way final result will look. Use only high resolution images for printing, and what is more apply vector images when it is possible.
Note that raster images of lower than 300 dpi will hardly satisfy your expectations.
Monochrome Laser Printer
Designing business cards for monochrome printing don’t use too many colors. The difference between related colors will be smallest and the whole card will look confusing.
Peculiarities of Hewlett-Packard HP laser printers
Some Hewlett-Packard printers may happen to show improper paper feeding accuracy, provided you preserved default print settings. You can set the kind of media in the tray on your own, as most HP LaserJets have driver settings enabling you to adjust printing process to your needs. By choosing "card stock" mode in the "printer features" panel you will make the printer feed the paper slower, which is good for accuracy.
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