I see hundreds of business card designs each year. Fancy cards, simple cards, cards from VistaPrint or Canva, cards from designers, and marketing agencies.

Cards in ecommerce orders, cards I get at trade shows, at special events, meetings etc… (see all these awesome places you need business cards for — ahem, *wink wink*)

With all these cards I see, there is one common design mistake many share. If you are doing the same thing, this mistake could be hurting your brand and making you miss opportunities.

It’s not the paper, or the coatings or the colors.. well those can be multiplying factors adding to the problem.

ULTIMATELY, THE MOST COMMON MISTAKE I WANT YOU TO AVOID IS:
Using fonts that are too small.

Now, I hear you saying, “really, I can read that tiny font!”

Maybe you have 20/20 vision and perfect lighting. Sometimes your customers do, too.

You don’t want to risk a potential customer, or media contact, or partner trying to get in touch you that ends up sending a request to the wrong email address since they couldn’t tell if your i’s are l’s, or c’s are o’s.

On screen, you can zoom in. With print, even if you hold cards 6 inches from your face when your fonts get tiny you risk them printing fuzzy and being unreadable.

As I explain three simple tips to avoid this mistake below, perhaps we should also explore a few common problems that cause this to happen…

PROBLEM 1. Design Program Templates

Now, I will start this point with a caveat. I think templates are a perfectly good starting point. The problem is that there are so many print templates designed by non-print designers who use tiny fonts.

A lot of these templates can be found on Canva. I know tons of you use this program so I decided to check out their business card options.

Low and behold, I stumbled upon a trough full of business cards template options where most of them used 6pt or even 5pt fonts.

Ouch, my eyes hurt straining to read them on screen.

There are plenty of great templates on Canva or other design apps, and you can definitely use one of them for your business cards. Just remember you can modify the template and increase the font size which brings us to our first tip:

TIP 1. Fonts No Smaller Than 7pt

Use fonts no smaller than 7pt for basic fonts, that are regular weight, bold or all caps. For fancy fonts, use sizes no smaller than 9pt.

Note: there may be some fluctuations as font sizing isn’t particularly standardized, but this can serve as a general guideline.

If you use fonts in a light color, it’s best to try to make them a bit larger too.

Business cards are primarily printed with 4 inks: C-cyan, M-magenta, Y-yellow, K-black. Those colors are actually printed in a pattern of dots. When there are small or thin letters, the dots don’t always make a complete line. If the color you print is lighter, the dots are lighter and when combined with incomplete lines, the fonts become soft and hard to read.

As much as printers try to register and keep those 4 colors lined up when printing CMYK, they don’t always align perfectly. Your fonts then print fuzzy and/or have a color halo which makes tiny fonts even harder to read.

PROBLEM 2. Trying to Cram in ALL The Things

The purpose of the business card is not to tell your whole brand story. It’s a brand tool with basic information for people to get in touch with you and for them to remember your business.

Save your brand story and the 10 ways to contact you for the website.

Another thing sometimes people forget — there are 2 sides to a business card.

Using the back of the card frees up valuable space on the front to make your name, and contact methods readable.

TIP 2. Don’t Forget the Back + Limit Contact Methods

Business cards should ideally only include your logo/company name, tagline, name, title, website, and the top 2 contact methods you prefer to get requests from. Your logo, url, and tagline (or short mission statement or value proposition) are great candidates for the back side.

If your business is a destination or your address is critical information, please include it.

Generally, for many businesses the contact methods to include are phone, email, website — and the first two should be listed in order of your preference to be contacted.

If you’re never at your desk or you don’t have another phone, list your cell. You can get a google voice number or other forwarding line if you don’t want to publish your personal cell.

If you are an online business or don’t want phone calls, don’t list a phone number.

If you take calls by appointment only, you can also leave off your number completely, or let people know by including a statement such as:

760-555-1234 by appointment only

– or –

phone calls by appointment

If you only text (perhaps because you’re still in your day job while building your business), you can say so on your card like this:

send text to 760-555-1234

– or –

760-555-1234 text only please

You can also list your most used social platform icon and handle instead of a phone number if you want to.

Note: You don’t need to include the full URL these days. Instagram could just be the little camera logo icon and @yourhandle

PROBLEM 3. Long Names + Titles on Corporate Templates

We see this with corporate brands who use the same template for all their staff — which is a great way to ensure brand consistency.

The problem is that generally when the design team that puts the primary layout together, they fail to use the longest name or title in the mock ups.

Then after the fact a new employee is hired with a really long name to put on their set of cards. This forces the designer to have a few choices: 1) shrink the font, 2) smush the font, or 3) reduce the spacing between letters (kerning + tracking). If they’re lucky they also have option 4) add another line of text to fit everything.

As designers, we get a little tweaked about skewing perfectly proportioned fonts and reducing letter spacing, and sometimes there is no space to add another line of text, so the most popular choice is often 1) reduce the font size to fit in the allocated space.

TIP 3. Use the Longest Name/Title on Design Proofs

If the longest name or title is used in the initial design layouts, your designer can properly plan for the space needed. If they show you a few design versions, chances are much better that all options will have the space needed so future names won’t need to be made smaller.