Cards

How do you make high quality, custom cards at low cost? We thought we'd try as many options as possible and see what happened. If you're using anything sharp to cut out cards please BE VERY CAREFUL! We do not accept any responsibility for any accidents!

AVERY CLEAN EDGE BUSINESS Cards

Avery's Clean Edge Business Cards offer by far the best results so far. Avery's 400/ pack Clean Edge A4 are available at discount prices of under $15 in the US. Just remember to switch your printer to A4 and check that it'll take a 220-260 gsm business card. The Avery site has a range of matte or gloss cards, and laser or inkjet cards.

A link to a Word Template is available from the same page. Click on the links below to download a PDF or SVG template to drag the standard Clean Edge template into your drawing or painting software.

PDF Business Card Template
SVG Business Card Template

The UK's Avery 'Quick and Clean' Business Cards are similar but the options are more limited. There are only 250 cards in a pack of single-side 'Quick and Clean' cards. We'll take a look around and see if we can find some cheaper options in the UK and Europe.

Perforated Card And Papers

Can't believe it took us so long to switch to perforated card. Dragging and dropping images to make custom card sets in Inkscape, CorelDraw or Illustrator is quick. But everything slows down when it comes to cutting out the cards unless there's a guillotine handy.

After seeing a set printed and 'peeled' with perforated business cards we've given up on cutting out Treasure cards. It's much simpler to load the printer with perforated card or paper and just tear the cards out after printing. If we use scissors or a craft knife to go along the perforations the edges are quite clean.

There are loads of different suppliers on Google but Avery gave us the most options. They have a range of perforated cards at different sizes and paper weights. Their site also provides templates in Word format, which can be copied into vector formats. They'll even let you make up cards online, print them to your specifications and ship them. Although that does start to get expensive.

If you're using Avery labels or card it's worth getting all the details from their site then running a search for local or discount prices, as it's often possible to make a saving.

Black and White Cards

You can print straight onto 100 gsm cartridge paper and you'll get a set of fairly flimsy cards that display the images quite well but won't last long.

If your printer can handle 120 gsm card, which most can, the images look good on white, off white and lightly coloured cards. The added thickness is enough to make the cards useable and you can get some good results by laminating cards that you're going to use frequently, e.g. Feature Rooms.

Better quality printers and thicker cards can make all kinds of custom cards. The ink density, paper/ card quality and the printer's paper handling affect the outcome. This approach is relatively expensive.

Blank Playing Cards

For the best cards, at the lowest price, (and without taking up much time), it makes a lot of sense to buy single or double blanked playing cards. We went to http://www.witzigs.co.uk/ where we picked up 200 double blanked cards for £2/$3 and, after try those out, 1000 blank cards for £10/ $15.

Amazon sells blank cards but there are plenty of specialist suppliers with different sizes and, in some cases, different colours. We used the cards in two ways.

With water soluble marker pens that let us quickly put the simplest version of any icon onto a card. We reckon this is the fastest cheap method to get cards that 'feel' right.

Sticky Labels

We also printed onto stickers. A4 and US Letter adhesive labels avoided any complications with positioning. After printing onto what were shipping labels, (which were cheaper than laser or inkjet labels), we simply cut the icons out as sticky labels with a guillotine and stuck them onto the blank cards.

Coloured Cards

The same approaches work in much the same way for coloured cards. The colour palette used for the coloured PDF icons is shown on the Colours page. Adding your own colours in Inkscape, CorelDraw or Illustrator is done by simply Selecting and Ungrouping the images and parts of images that you want to colour. Remember to Group them again after applying your choice of colours.

Coloured cartridges are quite expensive, so it is always a good idea to test a few samples before starting to print any sets of cards.

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