A business card is the smallest print job most people commission and the least forgiving. It's held 25 cm from the eye, so 300 DPI genuinely applies, and its small size makes every margin error proportionally huge.

Standard Sizes by Region

  • US / Canada: 3.5 × 2 in (88.9 × 50.8 mm)
  • Europe / most of the world: 85 × 55 mm
  • China: 90 × 54 mm (the most common), also 90 × 50 mm
  • Japan: 91 × 55 mm
  • Square: 55 × 55 mm, increasingly common

At 300 DPI, an 85 × 55 mm card is 1004 × 650 px, and with 3 mm bleed on each side it becomes 1075 × 720 px. A 90 × 54 mm card is 1063 × 638 px, or 1134 × 709 px with bleed.

Margins on a Small Canvas

  • Bleed: 3 mm beyond trim on all sides.
  • Safe area: keep all text 4–5 mm inside the trim line. On a card this is proportionally large, and it's the reason well-designed cards look airy — the margin isn't optional.
  • Minimum type size: 7–8 pt for body details, 6 pt absolute floor. Anything smaller is unreadable and looks like a mistake rather than a detail.

Rounded corners need extra caution: keep content further from the corners, since the rounding die has its own tolerance.

The Logo Problem

This is where most cards fail. A logo pulled from a website is typically a 200 px PNG designed for screen. Printed at 300 DPI, that's about 17 mm wide before it visibly degrades — and it will look soft and jagged next to crisp vector type.

What to use instead:

  • Vector (SVG, AI, EPS, or vector PDF) — scales to any size with no quality loss. Ask whoever made the logo for the vector original; it exists.
  • If only raster exists, you need at least 300 DPI at final printed size — for a 30 mm logo, roughly 355 px minimum, and more is better.
  • Never upscale a small logo for print. The jagged edges are more noticeable on paper than on screen because there's no display blur to hide them.

Colour and Finish

  • CMYK for offset; check whether your printer wants RGB for digital printing.
  • Rich black for large black areas (a CMYK mix rather than K only) — pure K looks washed out on large fills, though plain K is correct for small text.
  • Spot colours if brand colour accuracy matters; CMYK cannot reproduce some brand colours exactly.
  • Finish affects colour: matte lamination mutes and slightly darkens; gloss deepens saturation. Ask for a proof if colour is critical.

Final Checks

Text inside the safe area, bleed on all four sides, logo vector, fonts embedded or outlined, images 300 DPI at final size, correct colour mode, and both sides exported in the printer's requested format. Then order a small quantity first — a proof in hand catches things no screen preview will.