Business card maker with a print-ready layout

It depends on where the card will be handed over. The United States and Canada use 3.5×2 inches (89×51 mm), the European Union and the United Kingdom 85×55 mm, Japan 91×55 mm, Australia 90×55 mm, and Russia, the CIS, Eastern Europe and Latin America 90×50 mm. There is also the credit-card size of 85.6×54 mm, which fits a cardholder. All of them are in the list, and switching rebuilds the layout for the new proportions rather than stretching it.

A stack of cards is cut in one pass, and the blade wanders by about a millimetre — with the whole stack drifting one way. If the background stops exactly on the trim line, a cut that lands outside it leaves a white sliver of bare paper down one edge. So the background is printed oversized: 3 mm on each side in Europe, 2 mm in Russia. An 85×55 card is therefore supplied as a 91×61 file. The same imprecision has a mirror image — the safe area: anything closer than about 3 mm to the edge can be shaved off.

Because a screen emits light and paper reflects it. A monitor can show a vivid blue that four inks on paper physically cannot make, and converting it to CMYK lands on the nearest printable colour, which reads as duller. No setting recovers it. Here the preview computes colour through a model of process inks, so the muted blue is visible in the browser, and the palettes are built so that no unprintable colour is on offer in the first place. Enter your own colour and the tool shows how far it will shift.

You do not have to: by default the text leaves as vector outlines, which is exactly what "converted to curves" means. The requirement is not superstition — an embedded font is an instruction the printer's RIP has to carry out, and it can substitute the wrong weight or fail to find the face at all, whereas an outline is simply a shape. If you need a PDF with selectable text — to email the card, for instance — switch "Fonts in the PDF" to the second option.

Yes. The A4 sheet button lays the cards out with corner marks in the waste rather than lines across the cards themselves: a line printed on the cut path cannot be cut along accurately, because half of it stays on the card. The real hazard of home printing is scale — browsers and drivers default to "fit to page" and shrink the sheet by a few per cent, and the card stops being its stated size. That is why a 50 mm ruler is printed in the sheet margin: hold a real ruler against it and you know within seconds whether the scale was 100%.

Almost always because the module — the small square a code is built from — came out under 0.4 mm. The more data a code holds, the more modules are packed into the same square, so a full contact at 15 mm becomes unreadable while looking perfect on screen. Non-Latin scripts make it worse: in UTF-8 a Cyrillic or Korean character costs two or three bytes instead of one, so the same contact lands two or three QR versions larger. The tool shows the module size in millimetres and, when there is not enough room, shortens the code to what matters most — name, phone and email.

Usually a logo on a colour field, a tagline, or a large QR code. Repeating the contact details is a poor use of it: the back is read second, and a repeat takes space without adding anything. Double-sided printing also costs more than single-sided, so if there is nothing to say, choose "Blank" and the PDF will have one page. Bear in mind that front-to-back registration drifts by a millimetre or two, so avoid elements on the back that must line up exactly with the front.

The artwork is assembled and exported in your browser through Canvas and WebAssembly, with no installation. The "Save project" button writes a file to your own computer, logo included, so you can reopen it later or on another machine.