GIMP Tutorial: Business Card Design

this is knit with logos by Nick comm and in today's tutorial I'll be demonstrating how you can design print ready business cards using so I'll go ahead and open up my document here to show you what I have I'm going to be designing a business card that is the u.s. standard size which is 3.5 inches wide by 2 inches high and with a quarter inch bleed and I'm going to show you how to account for bleed lines using the bleed is the area that gets trimmed off after it's printed so the design has to extend all the way to the edges of the document but the important area has to be the important elements have to be kept within the bleed line areas and you could actually add another quarter inch area for the safe area I'll show you how to set all of this up so I'm gonna go ahead and create a new document for the size I'm gonna set this to inches now the standard business card size is 3.5 3.5 inches wide by 2 inches high but the standard print shop wants you to have a quarter inch bleed on your document so what that means is we add a quarter inch to each dimension so this would really be 3.75 by 2.25 and I'm gonna go to Advanced Options down here and we're gonna have to set the DPI as well now usually print shops usually work with about 300 or 350 dpi I like to do 350 just to be safe because even if they do use 300 they can work with 350 as well it's easier to scale down than it is to scale up so I'm gonna set this the X&Y resolution make sure they're both set to 350 and after that we'll be set and go ahead and click OK and we will have our new document I'm just going to hold ctrl and roll down the mouse-wheel let's zoom out a little bit what we're gonna have to do now is add our bleed lines so to do that I'm going to create a new layer right here where it says create a new layer I'm gonna set the size of this layer let me set this to inches the size of this layer is going to be the size of the actual document after it gets trimmed after it gets printed and trimmed which is 3.5 3.5 by 2 inches and we want to fill this in with white and go ahead and click OK and now I'm going to grab the alignment tool which is right here I'm gonna click on that layer that we just created so it's selected and I'm gonna set the relative to set that to image and then just Center it up on the document on the vertical and horizontal axis like that what we could do now is let me just grab the move tool to get rid of those selections mm-hmm I'm gonna right click on that layer and go to alpha to selection and now we can delete that layer because we no longer need it now we can go to image guides new guides from selection and that's gonna put new guides at the 3.5 by 2 inch mark and everything outside of that will be cut off after it's printed so let me go to select none so you can see this better there is our bleed lines right there now we're gonna have to create additional lines in on the inside of those which is for the safe area if you notice when you do whenever you're designing something if you put like these elements too close to the edge there's a possibility that could be cut off by the printer because there is a slight margin of error when you're whenever a print shop cuts something after it's printed so it's it's a good idea to just create a safe area to keep the contents and so to do that I'm gonna create another new layer this one instead of making it the same size as the document we're gonna make it a quarter inch smaller on each dimension so I'm gonna set that to inches 3.5 inches minus a quarter inch would be three point two five inches and then the height instead of being two inches it would be one point seven five because again we're subtracting a quarter inch from each dimension and again we want that set to white go ahead and click OK I'm gonna grab the alignment tool I'm gonna click on that layer just like we did previously Center it up on the vertical and horizontal axis right click that layer and go to alpha to selection and then go ahead and delete it and then go to image guides new guides from selection and there is our safe area so I'm gonna go to select none and there we have our setup for our 3.5 by 2-inch business card with a quarter inch bleed and at 350 dpi so what you can do is you could actually go in save this as a template save it as a dot xcf file so that whenever you want to design a business card moving forward you can just start out with this template instead of having to go through those steps in fact I'll save this template myself and I'll put a link in the description if you case in case you'd like to download and save a copy of it yourself so what we're gonna do now is start designing so the first thing I'm gonna do here is add this headshot I'm gonna open up the headshot graphic here this is just a standard stock photo I found online you could use your own photo or your clients photo or you can just use this photo if you'd like to follow along with what I'm doing I'm gonna grab the ellipse select tool and I'm just going to click and drag and hold ctrl to create a perfectly round circle like that and then I'm gonna hold alt and click and drag that circle to position it over the area that I want to grab it right there once we've done that I'll right-click that actually I'll go to edit copy then I'll come over back to our document and go to edit paste as new layer now I'm gonna grab the scale tool click on the newly pasted image here I might want to bring the opacity down a little bit if you're using the older version of like I am and I'm just gonna scale this down I'm gonna hold ctrl so it locks the proportions scale that down about that much go ahead and click scale to finalize that let me grab the move tool and just put this over here now move the page around I'm just pressing down the mouse wheel and moving the mouse like that what I'm going to do is I just want to Center that up on the horizontal axis so I'm going to grab the alignment tool go ahead and click on that image to select it and then just Center it up just like that and now I'm going to create some text and the text is gonna be part of this design here where the letters kind of like run into each other and they're attached to this colored in area so to do that I'm going to grab the text tool I'm going to choose a new color up here the color I'm using is 0 0 ACC 1 go ahead and click OK and I'm just gonna click on the canvas and I'm gonna write as just like a placeholder name I'm going to write John Smith I'm going to change the font to Montserrat heavy you could use any font you'd like I recommend using a heavy weight bold font like I'm using here I'm going to make the size of that bigger so come up here just hold that arrow up to increase the size and I want those letters to run into each other like I mentioned previously so I'm gonna come over here this bottom icon where it shows the letters next to each other and just decrease that just like that and we could even make this a little bigger actually that's looking pretty good now I'm gonna grab the alignment tool click on that text and again Center that up on the horizontal axis like we did with the head shot there now I'm gonna grab the move tool it's gonna make sure I have this positioned right where I want it I'm holding ctrl to lock it onto its axis I'm gonna move this one over to maybe about that far I'll move this one a little closer whoops this one a little closer like that what we're gonna do now is just create that colored-in area so to do that I'm going to create a new layer we're gonna use transparency for this one go ahead and click OK and we want to move this one down two steps so it's just above the background there and I'm gonna grab the Select tool and I'm just gonna click and drag over the bottom half of this image until it's touching the bottom until it's touching the bottom of that text right there and I'll just go to edit fill with foreground color and then we can go to select none and now we can go ahead and add some more text in here like the I like the job title the position and the contact information so to do that let me click on the top layer grab the text tool let me flip the colors around so that I'm working with white text instead of that greenish blue I'll go ahead and click on the canvas here and for this I'm just gonna write a job title slash position and we want different text for this one so I'm going to choose texe gyre inventor bold I probably pronounced that wrong let me bring the size of that down any really any font can work here it's just a matter of personal preference I tend to like these simple sans fonts let me increase the we set that back to zero and I could just decrease the size of that a little bit grab the move tool and just position this right beneath the name there and I'm gonna duplicate that text created ooh click the button that says create a duplicate of a layer and add it to the image grab the move tool bring this oops grab this and bring this over here go back to the text tool click on that to select it and I'm just going to bring the size down this is going to be like the the contact information down here so I'm just gonna write in like a phone number just like a placeholder text here five five five I'll hit enter to go to the next line I'll put the email address here and I want to increase the spacing between those two lines so I'll click on this icon up here and increase the arrow just like that and grab the Select tool I'm going to move this over and I'm gonna create a duplicate of that layer I mean out of that text item and then just bring this over here let's keep grabbing the wrong thing I'm gonna hold ctrl so it locks it onto the horizontal axis so they're both in the same plane like that and again I'll go back to the text tool I'm gonna use here I guess city state and then company website comm and you pretty much get the idea but you know we're just putting contact information in here you could put whatever contact information you'd like let me zoom out that should pretty much do it for the design everything else that we'd have to do next would be like little details like clicking and dragging the logo into which is pretty simple and using these icons as well but I won't get into those granular details otherwise the video will be a little too long but you should get the idea it's pretty simple to go about finishing up the rest of this if you'd like to use these icons here these are contact icons that I created I'll put a link in the description to where you can download the and use them as well same thing with these social media icons I have a bundle of all these icons you could download and use them however you'd like that's how you can go about creating print-ready business cards with if you have any questions let me know and as always thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 46,846

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Id: XPXHviyBk_s

Length: 11min 28sec (688 seconds)

Published: Tue May 22 2018