canucker

Hey all,

Just a quick question. I'm starting up a small company and I want to design some business cards that I can take into Kinko's to get made up. Do any of you know some software I could use off the internet that would do this? I don't need anything fancy just something to import a picture and put some font in.

Thanks,

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arch13

There are templates you can find for both adobe and microsoft office products that are compatable with most industrial printer setups for card printing.
Talk to the printer first about what software they use and what format they prefer.
(and i'd recomend not using kinkos. Use a local printer and you'll be making a business relationship that may pay dividends down the line)

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canucker

When you say there are templates for adobe and microsoft office products, what am I looking for? I don't need anything fancy for now. Just a jpeg and some font on the card is all i'm looking for. This business is REAL small. I just don't know what too search for.

Cheers,

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f00sion

Try vistaprint.com for your cards.. you can design them online and they are very affordable.

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arch13

The minum order for most printing companies is around 250 cards, which may sound like alot but if your small then you should be putting those in the hands of all prospective business you meet.
Google terms like "Business card template" and "Office card template" for an idea of what's availible.
Jpegs are of a quiltity not suitable for proffesional printing. TIFF's are standard in the print industry. Any printer will be happy if you provide a high res TIFF. They'll curse you under their breath if you have them work with a difficult to scale and low res JPEG.
It may serve you better to find a printer first, find out the size of the image they need to fit a business card, and create it in photoshop as a TIFF.
If your going with Kinkos, still find out what file type and resolution they want.

Just please tell me your not trying to make a business card with more than a couple colors. I'm a designer and i can tell you that everytime someone hands me a buisness card with a full color backround image with color fonts i cringe. A buisness card is your chance for a first impression and something crisp, sparse, and proffesional is a thing of bueaty in my book. Hardly every has a CEO passed out a color buisness card.
My cards are on bone white watercolor stock with my name and contact information in Verdana black and my proffesion and credentials under my name in Pantone true red.
Look into the pantone system at a later date when your company grows and you need more buisness cards and advertising. It's the international color system all printers in the world use and by spec'ing your colors you can garaunte that no matter who does your printing, it's identical. That's later though.

Hope i've helped a little.

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Halx

I used to work at Kinko's several years ago in the computer dept. I printed out biz cards daily. Here is what we liked.

Biz cards are 2" x 3.5" You can fit them 4x3 on a 8.5" x 11" with a .25" border on the outer edge (which is usually the printing capacity of the printer).

If you wanna just give them a file and have them handle the 12-up alignment, make it an EPS file. Encapsulated Postscript is raw printer instructions that can be embedded into a Pagemaker file easily.
If you wanna do it all yourself, the program suggested is Adobe Pagemaker, though you can use Adobe Acrobat or QuarkXPress.

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Jam

just search for vistaprint, you can get 250 free business cards (the catch, you ppay shipping and theres a small(i think) watermark or web adress on the reverse of the card