Designing a chic striped business card with Photoshop

This is a guest post by Kristina Cruz, if you want to guest post on this blog, please contact us.

If you want a simple yet chic and sophisticated approach on your business card design, then this is the tutorial for you. You will learn how to design your own chic and striped style business card using Adobe Photoshop. It does not matter if you are a beginner when it comes to design here. With the instructions below, you can easily follow without too much difficulty.

So follow through on the items you see below and you will see yourselfcreating your own chic striped business card in no time at all.

Now to start, we shall create a new document in Adobe Photoshop. Just go to File -> New… The new document dialog window should open. You will now be able to set the precise dimensions of the business card that we are going to create. There are several standards that you can pattern your print-ready business card size on, but below are the typical settings that you can start out with.

1. Width: 3.5 inches
2. Height: 2 inches
3. Resolution: 300ppi
4. Color Mode: CMYK (for printing)

Once your new document is open, it is a good idea to add some margins. These will help you place your design elements correctly, without them getting too close to the business card edge. You can set guidelines easily enough by click dragging them from the rulers. Just activate the rulers by pressing CTRL+R. Then, do the click-drag action with your mouse going to the design canvass. Apply a 0.25 inch margin for the top, bottom, left and right sides.

For this design trick to be done effectively, you will need to have chosen already a good color scheme. You can try creating a color scheme yourself, or you can go to websites like colourlovers.com to choose the scheme. For our example, we will be using this color scheme – directly from colourlovers.

Load the color palette up, by clicking on the foreground color and then copy pasting the color hex code from the colour lovers site to the color picker. With the color set on the foreground, click on a blank area of the swatches panel to set that color.

Now, click on the LINE SHAPE TOOL in the tools panel. Make sure you set one of the theme colors that you just saved in the palette. Go to the options bar above, and change the “Weight Value” of this line to 60px or so. Then, hold down the SHIFT key and click and drag the mouse vertically from top to bottom in your canvass. You should see a very thick line color appear.

Keep creating new line shapes using the same process as above. Of course, vary the color, the position and the width of the lines when you can. Make sure you place together to different colors most of the time to get a more contrasting effect with these lines.

After adding all the lines, it would be best to merge them all into one. Just select all the shapes you created by holding the CTRL key and then clicking on all the layers. Afterwards, right click on it and select the option “Merge layers”.

Next, select the rectangle tool. We inscribe a rectangle for the top of our business card design.

Next, we shall add the text for our business card. Simply use the text tool to type in the appropriate text content for your design. Use a nice looking font style fit for your tastes. However, it is usually best to use something clean and thick for business cards. Vary of course the size for your name and your detail content. It is best to first create the largest text as the main feature that all other content will go around.

Once your title is set, just use smaller font styles for the important contact information.

Then, double click on one of the layers to bring up its layer styles. Click on “Bevel and Emboss”. Set the following values for the attributes of this layer style.

1. Style: Pillow Emboss
2. Shadow Mode Opacity: 30%
3. Rest can be default.

To make the other text layers look more visible, we add in some colored rectangle shapes just behind the text layers. We positioned them creatively so that they help emphasize the other key information in the business card.

Then, we just change the blend mode of the box layers to “linear light”. This lightens up our box color a bit.

Great! That should finish our chic, simple and sophisticated type business card design. Congratulations!

Kristina Cruz has a degree in English and has found her niche writing about marketing, advertising, branding, graphic design, and desktop publishing. She writes for PrintPlace.com, an online printing company that offers business cards, posters, modern brochure printing, postcards, and more printed marketing media. In addition to her writing career, Kristina also enjoysplaying the guitar, cooking and spending time with her family.

Source: http://ibrandstudio.com/tutorials/chic-striped-business-card-photoshop-design