Business Cards Printing: The Final Phase

Once you've chosen your card design and outline, content and style, the only thing that you are left with is the printing of the card. Though you may think that this is the least important or difficult of all the steps involved, it is not so simple. Actually, printing goes a long way in ensuring the success of your cards distribution worthiness.

Printing is in fact one of the primary stages of getting a business card since it is the last before you receive your finished product and determines your satisfaction with it. In case, of a bad print format, you may not be satisfied with your card at all and may even have to get it corrected. In a worse case scenario, you would have to ask for the cards to be re printed resulting in wastage of time and money, both of which come very costly in today's world. There are however, steps with which you can ensure that the printing goes according to your satisfaction.

These include:

Printing cards with images and gradient colors: Opting for glossy paper is advisable to ensure that the image looks as good as it does on the screen. Otherwise, the print output might not be what you thought it would be.

Printing cards with backgrounds: If the card contains background image or color, the paper opted for should be with gaps between cards. The gap compensates for any imprecision on the part of the printer paper feed mechanism. Also try not to let the pictures on your design end exactly at the edge of the card. You can keep a gap between the edge and the picture or go over it, in case, it's a background.

Fighting printing offset on ink jet printers: Ink jet printers normally have the tendency to zoom the print output a little. For this reason, each next row of cards may be slightly offset up or down with respect to the previous one and may come up to 0.5- 1mm by the end of the sheet. This problem usually doesn't exist with laser printers. To combat this you can use the scale field during the printer calibration process.

Print quality settings need to be checked: The desired print quality and color options need to be set before the printing. This can be saved in presets list for more convenience for frequently used settings.

Printing on paper without gaps between rows: Images and texts must be located a least 3mm off the edge to avoid problems while printing on print stock without gaps. Then, even if there is a slight printer imprecision it wont make a difference.

Use paper compatible with your printer: Using glossy paper in a laser printer may result in the breakdown of the printer.

Printing on monochrome laser printer: Avoid using too many colors as they may become indistinguishable and messy.

Laser printers and ink jet printers: The print card as raster image option has to be avoided in a laser printer. It should be enabled in ink jet to avoid problems with printing.

Printing images in high quality: High resolution images should be used to ensure that the pictures come out well on printed cards. Use the largest image possible and in vector format. For raster images, at least 300 dpi's is required.

Following the above tips, you would be able to get your business cards printed without any hassles at all. The quality would also be intact and usable.

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