Your business card is often the first thing clients hold in their hands from your firm. Here you design it in your colours, with the correct professional title and a back for appointments, office hours or a QR code. The result is a print file with bleed that any common online printer will accept.
The front: little text, the correct title
A firm’s business card usually has a clear occasion: it is handed over at the first meeting, after a talk or at a networking event, and needed again weeks later when a deadline approaches or documents need to be submitted. Then what counts is that the phone number and email address are easy to find. A calm front with your name and academic degree, professional title, firm name and contact details, and nothing else, has proven itself.
Write your professional title exactly as in your legal notice and only in the form you actually hold it: for example “Rechtsanwältin” (lawyer), “Steuerberater” (tax adviser), “Öffentliche Notarin” (notary) in Austria, “Notar” in Germany or “eingetragene Mediatorin” (registered mediator) if you are entered in the list of the Austrian Ministry of Justice. Fachanwalt titles exist only in Germany and only once awarded by the Rechtsanwaltskammer.
The back: initial consultation, office hours or QR code
What you use the back for depends on your everyday work. If you arrange many first meetings, choose the appointment card with lines for date and time and a note such as “Please bring your documents”. Firms with fixed consultation hours print their office hours there. Also possible: a large QR code or just the firm name on a coloured background.
With the QR code, you decide what happens after scanning: your firm’s website opens, your contact details are saved to the address book as a vCard, or the Google review form appears. Because the code gets plenty of space on the back, phone cameras recognise it even on textured card.
From file to printed card
To order, all you need is the print PDF. Page 1 is the front, page 2 the back, each 91 × 61 mm in size. After trimming, this gives the usual final size of 85 × 55 mm, because 3 mm of bleed is included all round. In the printer’s order form, enter 85 × 55 mm and double-sided printing.
Solid colours extend beyond the later cutting edge. That way, no white strip appears at the edge even if the cut is slightly off. Everything that must remain legible, i.e. text and QR code, sits at least 4 mm inside the edge. You can see both lines if you activate “Show trim and safety lines”.
The printer does not need any font files: in the PDF and the SVG, every letter is stored as a vector shape, so the card is printed exactly as you see it on screen. If a printer only accepts images, use the PNG files at 300 dpi.
On screen, colours are made of light (RGB), in print of four inks (CMYK). The printer converts them, and particularly bright shades therefore often look a little more muted on paper. For a first order, a small print run is worthwhile.
Free fonts and icons with no licence fees
Every font in the generator is a Google Font under the SIL Open Font License, and every icon comes from the open-source set Lucide under the ISC licence. Both licences allow you to print your cards without fees. And what you type stays on your device: the generator runs entirely in the browser.
