Business card maker

The two standard sizes are genuinely different and not interchangeable. Europe and most of the world use 85 × 55 mm, which is the same as a credit card. The United States and Canada use 3.5 × 2 inches, which is 89 × 51 mm — wider and shorter. A US card does not fit a European cardholder, and a European card rattles in a US one. Pick the one for wherever the cards will be handed out.

The grid is centred rather than started from a corner, and that matters for cutting. An off-centre grid leaves a wider margin on one edge than the other, so a guillotine cut set up from the paper edge is wrong on one side. Centring means the same setting works from either edge.

Crop marks sit just outside each corner rather than on the cut line, which is the printing convention: marks printed on the line itself end up as ink on the finished card. They give you something to line a blade up against without appearing on the result.

On printing at home honestly: 160 gsm is about the heaviest most domestic printers will take, and a real business card is 300 to 400 gsm. Home-printed cards feel like what they are. For a handful before an event that is fine; for anything that matters, this PDF is better used as a proof than as the final artefact.

One thing this deliberately does not do is bleed. A design with colour running to the edge needs 3 mm of bleed beyond the trim and a printer that can handle it, which is a commercial process rather than an A4 sheet.