Business Card
3.5 x 2 in CMYK 1.75:1 landscape
A 3.5 by 2 in US business card. The smallest piece of branded design most people carry, and the one most often handed over without reading.
about the size of a wallet
About this size
A business card is held in a hand for two or three seconds and then dropped into a wallet, a stack, or a coat pocket. It has to survive that moment with three things intact: who the person is, what they do, and how to reach them. Everything else is decoration.
Design-wise it is a small canvas with strict physical constraints. The full sheet (with bleed) is 3.75 by 2.25 in; the trim is 3.5 by 2 in; the safe area where the cut will not threaten the design is 3.25 by 1.75 in. Type smaller than 8 pt becomes hard to read at arm's length and any element pushed into the outer 0.125 in band may not survive the cut.
- Business cards
- Contact cards
- Branding
Pro tips
- 1 Bleed when the design runs to the edge. 0.125 in of background past the trim line keeps the cut from revealing white edges. Skip bleed only when the design has its own clear white margin.
- 2 The safe area is the inner 3.25 by 1.75 in. Logos and contact text live there. Anything outside that band is at the printer's mercy.
- 3 Three pieces of information at most: name, role, one contact path. Phone, email, and URL all on the same card crowd the design and bury the one that matters.
- 4 Type at 8 pt or higher. Below that, even high-contrast text gets hard to read at the distance a card is naturally held.
Common mistakes
- Text or logo at the trim edge. The cut varies by 0.05 in on most commercial presses, which is enough to slice through a logo if it sits on the line.
- Low-resolution logo files. A 72 DPI screenshot at 1 in wide looks crisp in the source file and prints as a fuzzy patch at the press.
- Designing the front and forgetting the back. Single-sided cards read as budget. Even a single colour-block back signals more care than a blank reverse.
Export notes
Export as a CMYK PDF at 300 DPI with 0.125 in bleed (final canvas 3.75 by 2.25 in). Embed or outline all fonts; commercial print houses rarely have access to designer font libraries. For two-sided cards, include front and back as separate pages in the same PDF, not as two files; the press uses page order to determine which face prints where.
Frequently asked
What is the standard US business card size?
3.5 by 2 in. European standard is slightly different at 85 by 55 mm. Cards designed for one standard look proportionally off when printed at the other.
How much bleed should a business card have?
0.125 in on every side. The trim is 3.5 by 2 in, the full canvas with bleed is 3.75 by 2.25 in, and the safe area for critical content is the inner 3.25 by 1.75 in.
Should business cards be CMYK or RGB?
CMYK for commercial print. That is the press colour space, and converting before export gives you control over how saturated colours shift. RGB files get converted automatically and the result is harder to predict.
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