Create a Print Ready Business Card in Adobe Illustrator from Start to Finish !!!

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Hi thanks again for watching OneMinuteDigital.com. Today is a little bit longer tutorial today
for those of you who are interested in learning how to design and save your file for a printer
a business card. And I'm going to be working a little bit in Photoshop but mostly in Illustrator Create a Print Ready Business Card in Adobe Illustrator from Start to Finish !!! to show you how to prepare your card. You have a business, you need a business card
- maybe you don't have a logo yet - but you can still make a really nice looking business
card with just a photo and a little bit of type manipulation. So the few things that
I want you to keep in mind are are here on the screen. Use a high resolution image that's

dpi or more for your printed card. And make sure it's CMYK. Outline your fonts, make
sure to add bleed if it's a full bleed image, and don't use more than
print letterhead fonts, that's
more of a design tip than printing. But these are the things that printers will look for
and if you don't have the files prepared correctly they're going to ask you to redo them, resend
them, or they're going to fix them the way they think they should be done. So here we
go, from start to finish we're going to design a business card and get it ready for print.
OK, first thing, in Adobe Illustrator go to File > New. And you have the option here for
number of artboards. We can have as many as we want, we only need
front and the back of the business card. Your files size is going to be
x
business card size is
x 2 but when they have bleed they need to be a little bit bigger
so that the edge as you can see here gets cut off. And the artwork needs to go all the
way to the edge so that when they're cutting if it doesn't go all the way to the edge you
might have a white line at the edge which looks really, really bad. So we want to make
sure our files size is a little bit bigger than the actual printed size. Say OK and now
we have two artboards. The front of the business card and the back. IF you go to Window > Artboards
you can see them here, Artboard 1 and Artboard
Now for the front of the business card we're going to use a photograph, that cupcake photo
that I showed you in the earlier screen. Let's open up that image. I downloaded that image,
the cupcake image, from morguefile.com, it's a great place for free stock photos. So let's
go ahead and open that image that I got. It was a jpeg. And here it is it's a cute little
image. If you go to Image > Size you can see it's
inches wide by
high but it's only

dpi. For printing, the resolution of your Photoshop images needs to be
dpi, there's
no ifs ands or buts about it you need to have a high resolution image for that. So, making
sure none of these options here are checked, go ahead and highlight that
and change
it to 300. And you can see the width and the height changed, it went down to about

now instead of that huge image. It's going to make it smaller, but that's still much
much bigger than we need for a business card. So say OK. Now go to Image > Mode and change
it from RGB to CMYK, that's what it needs to be for printing, Say OK, and now we're
going to Save it, Save As, and I'm going to call this cupcakes and save it as a TIF file,
this is the best to use for printing. I mean if you saved it as a Photoshop or as a jpeg
it's really not the end of the world but you really need to save it as a TIFF for printing.
So now it's cupcakes.tif and save it. OK, so we're done with that one going back to
Illustrator: Let's place our image that we want to use first off so you're on the first
artboard which is Artboard #1 the front of the card. Let's move it over. Go to File > Place.
Now search wherever it is on your desktop in a folder where you just saved that photo.
It's cupcakes.tif - Place. And see, it's much much bigger than we need and it's a high resolution
image so it's great. So let's, Holding down Shift, click on the corner and drag that down,
until it's about the size of our business card. Now the next thing we need to talk about
is BLEED. This document is sized a little bit bigger than a business card, remember?
It's
x 2.125. What you should do as you're working is click on your Rectangle
Tool here, click anywhere on the artboard and make a
x
OK. Now using your Selection Tool, move that right into the center of your business card.
Go down here to your Swatches palate, click on the white part here and click on this red
slash that's going to get rid of the white part of that rectangle, and just leave you
that stroke, the black outline. I want that there because I want you to see how big you
have to make your image so that it bleeds outside of the business card because it's
going to be cut there, and if we don't have our image extending all the way, when it cuts
it could leave a white line at the edge, you don't want to do that. So you need to make
sure that you see the area that you're working with, that you can't go outside this area
with your type or your picture and that's really going to help you later. So put that
in the center, now Copy that:Edit > Copy and Edit > Paste And the new one, just grab it
and move it over to your second artboard so we have that there as well when we work on
the back. So this is the bleed area outside of this black rectangle. Okay, so we have
our image, we have our rectangles here. Now we need to design the rest of our business
card. So let's just say the name of this company is One Minute Bakery. Just use your Type tool
and type it. Get your selection tool, grab it, bring it down. And let's pick a nice font
for that, so go to Window > Type > Character. If you use this window, when you click on
the name of the font you'll get a preview of all the fonts in the actual style that
the font is in. If you go up to here, the character palate on your toolbar, it does
not show you a preview, so that's kind of boring. You don't get to see what it's going
to look like. So if you click on your word, go over to your Character palate, and then
you can play with it and see what they look like before it changes. It helps you decide
what font to use. So I'm going to go ahead and use Pacifico. And now, Holding down Shift,
hover over it til you get those arrows and pull it out til it gets to be the size you
want. I think that looks good: One Minute Bakery. Now let's have a tagline for our business.
How about, just using the type tool, click anywhere, here is fine, let's call it - just
start typing, it doesn't matter - "Cupcakes on the Go." Now I assume you have all of your
words written, I'm just sort of making this up as we go along. Now for the tagline we
don't need it to be in the same fonts as the logotype, so lets select that and go over
again here to our Character palate. If it's gone, make sure you go to Window > Type > Character.
But it is here, and let's change that to a little bit easier to read font for smaller
type. How about I like Arial, where is Arial, where are you where are you...Arial Narrow
and Italic. That's going to be our tagline. We're going to put that under neath. I think
it's a little bit big, let's make it smaller. Up here in the tool bar you can just go ahead
and click the arrow down until it gets to be a good size for a tagline. Then just grab
it and move it over there, it looks pretty good. Now, go over back to your Type Tool
and click and drag, make a nice box here. Now you;'re just going to start typing all
your information, you probably have this all ready, I'm just going to make this up. Joan
Smith is the Owner, and the phone number is area code
joan@onemintebakery.com and the website is www.oneminutedigital.com and the address is

Main St. if you hit Option and the number
Yourtown USA 12345. So now we have all of the information that we need in our business
card. So you still have this selected and now it's time for a little bit of styling.
I think this is a little bit big for the textbox, we're going to go ahead and make that smaller
so just hover over there, select that bottom address and lets make that maybe
and that should fit very nicely, maybe even
go below 7 points, that's too small. Now, I think it all fits but let's start at the
top. So, One Minute Bakery. It looks okay in black but maybe we want it pink to match
the color in this photo. So, over here on yout Toolbar go find your Eyedropper tool,
it looks like the little eyedropper and anywhere you select in here it's going to sample that
color. Here's the brown of the chocolate, the white of the coconut, and the pink of
the tablecloth underneath it. I think that looks good for the logotype. So there we go
we have One Minute Bakery, it almost looks like a logo. And when you center it, keep
in mind you're not centering it to this edge because this edge is going to be cut off.
You want to center it in this rectangle here to the edge of your photo. So give it a good
amount of space between and it looks good. How about the tag line?Cupcakes on the Go.
I think it maybe should be grey, so double-click on your fill palate with it highlighted. Pick
a nice grey color and that looks good. Maybe make it a little bit bigger. With that selected,
Hold down Shift and drag this out and that looks a little bit bigger it stands out a
little bit. It's different from the main type and it looks like a tagline. How about, though,
if we make that all caps. Let's go to Type >Change Case > Upper Case. I like it better
in all caps but maybe not so big so Holding down Shift, move that again and there we go,
there's our tagline. Now let's style the rest of it. It's a little too close to the top,
let's move it down a little bit. Let's highlight Joan Smith and let's make it the same as the
tagline. So using your eyedropper tool again with that highlighted just select that and
it's going to go ahead and change it to the same font size and color as the one you just
selected. I like that but maybe we should make it bold. So it's Arial Narrow Italic,
we're going to make it Bold Italic. And maybe
for Owner that's find underneath. Phone number let's give it a little bit of space. So go
ahead and highlight that, go over to your Character palate, and this is your Leading
setting here the 2 A's on top of each other, just give it a little bit of space, click
the arrow up, up, up maybe three times is fine and also with the address. Let's go ahead
and select that go over here to your Leading and up, up, up. Just separates thise a little
bit, give it a little bit of breathing room. Now kind of make sure it's centered. Move
it where you want it. I think that looks really nice. There we go for the front. Okay, so
moving to the back just hold down your spacebar, get your little hand and move it over so you
can work with it here. I think we're going to make the background pink for this one.
A full bleed pink card. So using your rectangular tool, just click and drag, it doesn't matter
how far out you go but you only need to go about that far. Using your eyedropper, select
that pink area again and go to Object > Arrange > Send to Back. Okay, now there;'s our area,
our pink area full bleed all the way to the edge. Now what are we going to put on the
back? That's up to you, I'm going to go ahead and make something up. So, using your type
tool click and drag and we're going to say: Best Cupcakes in Town, Open
and Visit our website: www.oneminutedigital.com. Now we have all this formatted to flush Left.
We want to make it Centered so with all this still selected just use your selection tool
the Black Arrow, go up to the top here. You can see there is Flush Left, Centered and
Flush Right. You want to make it Centered. And now if you hover over this bar and you
drag it all the way to the edge it will make sure that it is in exactly the center. I Think
we can make that a little bit bigger. Here in the Character Palate increase the Leading
also give it more space between the lines and I think we'll go ahead and highlight this
website address and over here on our color palate let's make that white. So that pops
out. Now this is the same font that we used for our information over here, our Owner information.
It's a good design tip is don't use too many fonts. I know it's tempting to go ahead and
use every font you have in your character palate but it looks really nice and professional
when you only use one or two fonts and so what we have is the entire thing is in this
Arial Narrow except for this logotype which is in Pacifico. And I think that looks pretty
good. Now we have the front and the back. So what you do to get this ready for print,
is first thing: Delete these rectangles that you made. Just select them, delete, select,
delete, because you don't need them to be there. Otherwise they will print so make sure
you get rid of those. Now we're going to Select All which is Command A or File, I don't know
I use key commands so much I don't remember, so Select All, command A and that selects
everything. Now go to Type > Create Outlines. That makes turns them from fonts into graphics
so now there are no fonts embedded any more it has changed them to a graphic. Now we want
to go to Window >Links. and it shows you any links you have in your file. In this case
we only have one image that is linked here that was not created in Illustrator. It was
created in Photoshop and linked here. We need to embed that image because we're going to
send it to a printer who doesn't have this on his desktop, he only has it in the file.
So on your Links palate click on this little arrow up at the top and say "Embed Image"
and that's going to make sure that image stays in there forever and never leaves. Okay, now
we have it, let's go ahead and Save it - sorry, too many key commands - File > Save As and
let's call this buscardPRINT. Save it as a pdf and save it where you want it. Now here
in Illustrator in the Adobe pdf preset, you want to click there and select Press Quality.
Uncheck Optimize for fast web preview but leave preserve Illustrator editing capabilities
checked just in case your printer needs to in and move something you just never know
when you're going to have to do something and if this is checked they will be able to
do that. Under Compression make sure it is not downsampled. Check do not downsample.
We wnat to make sure it stays at high resolution and say Save pdf. And now if we open it in
Adobe Acrobat we open that bcardPrint, there it is our beautiful high resolution image
and if you look here in your page thumbnails it is not one but two files, front and back.
And this file is absolutely print-ready, CMYK, Outlined Fonts, Embedded Images, and it's
ready to send to your printer. And that really is the best way to do it to do a full color
business card. One thing I didn't mention is that you should always save a copy of your
layered file before you do all the outlining and embedding. So make sure to save a copy
as a layered file. So if I Command Z undo, undo, undo, we can do File > Save As > and
call it buscardLAYERED, just to save a copy that you can go in and easily edit and keep
that as an Adobe Illustrator fiel and save that (.ai) in your folder just is case your
phone number changes later or something changes and we have to go in and edit it, we don't
have to retype everything. So there you go, that is the best way to get your files print-ready
and printed. I hope this was helpful, I know it was a long one for me but thanks so much
for watching and until next time, bye-bye. *** ***