BUSINESS
CARDS!

Here is our example. Mia is a mechanic. She has a lease, a workbench, a hand-painted sign that says Spoke & Sprocket, and one hundred customers who will each ask, “Have you got a card?” She has no designer, no print account, and no wish to learn what “bleed” means. She has an afternoon.

The usual way goes like this. A free template site with your phone number in Comic Sans on a stock photo of a handshake. Or a print shop's online editor that moves your text when you blink. Then the cards arrive with a thin white sliver down one edge, because the art stopped exactly where the blade came down.

This page is the other way, one afternoon long. The same file goes from blank to a box of cards, and each step leans on a different part of PopCraft. We link to the deep dives as we go, so this page can stay about the job.

Three card templates ship in the gallery. Each one is a Print file: fixed pages instead of an endless canvas, with the trim, bleed and safe margin already drawn.

Mia is in Europe, so she takes Bold at 85 × 55mm. If she were in New York she would take Minimal; in Osaka, the meishi. None of them is a picture of a card. They are real layers: text you click and type into, colours bound to variables, sides that are pages you can reorder.

A kit knows Mia's shop name and email. It doesn't know she is the Mechanic, or that the initials in the corner should say MO. Those are text variables in the card: the job title, the company, the initials. Set each one once in the file's variables and the card reads them wherever they appear. Change a title, the front follows.

Everything else is ordinary design. Swap the sparkle for a sprocket from the shape tools. Nudge the band wider. Drop a photo of the workshop on the back. Text styles keep the type sizes in step, so a bigger name doesn't mean hunting through six layers.

1. 1

   Pick a card

   New › File, search “business card”. Bold, Minimal or the Japanese meishi. Each has a front and a back, already at its size, with bleed and a safe margin set.
2. 2

   Put your brand on it

   ⋯ › Brand kit…. Colours, a heading and body font, your name, website, email and phone. Apply to document and both sides follow.
3. 3

   Say who you are

   Your job title and company are words on the card, bound to the file’s text variables. Change one and every place it shows changes.
4. 4

   Preflight

   The Preflight tab checks both sides: words too close to the cut, art that stops short of the bleed, lines too thin to print, fonts that are missing.
5. 5

   Print or export

   ⌘P for your own printer, with crop marks to cut to. Or Export as PDF in CMYK, with bleed and marks, for the print shop.
6. 6

   A card for everyone

   Bulk create merges a spreadsheet into the card: one page per person, every name and email filled in.

Business picks up. Mia hires two mechanics and they want cards too. Same design, three names. That is exactly what Bulk create (in the ⋯ menu) is for: it takes a CSV whose column headings are the fields the card shows, like brand.name, brand.title and brand.email, and adds one page per row. Three rows, three people, every page set to the same card, ready to export as one PDF.

The same trick makes conference name badges or the certificates at the end of a course. For the clever version with photos, an image layer named after a field takes a picture from each row too.