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When you print business cards by yourself or order to print them
in a print shop, you must think about maximum quality at acceptable pricing. The
following tips concern mostly the quality while printing on a desktop printer.
The price of a single printed card will mostly depend on used paper stock. Cards
with blank background will take less ink or toner, so they will be cheaper.
These tips don't refer to printing from Business
Card Composer itself (for more info about it see Online
Help or FAQ).
This article will tell you how to get best results with a certain printer, choose
the paper, select the most appropriate design and avoid common mistakes. Also
see the How
to choose a printer and How
to choose paper topics.
Printing Cards with Images or Gradient Colors
If you want to create (or already created) in Business Card Composer
a business card which contains a photo or a picture with gradient
colors — choose glossy
paper to make sure the printed cards look as nice as on the
screen. Otherwise, the print output may disappoint you.
Printing Cards with Backgrounds
If your cards contain a background color or background image, choose
the paper with gaps between cards (see details in “How
to choose paper”). The gaps allow you to compensate the
inevitable imprecision of the printer paper feed mechanism. Don't
let the pictures on your design end exactly on the edge of the card.
Allow a small distance to the edge, or, on the contrary, let it
go over the edge (if it's background).
Fighting the Printing Offset on Inkjet Printers
Inkjet printers have a nasty habit of slightly zooming the print
output. For this reason each next row of cards may be slightly offset
up or down with respect to the previous one. By the end of the sheet
the offset may come up to 0.5—1 mm. This doesn't seem to happen
with laser printers.
How to fight this? Use the Scale field during the printer calibration process
(as described in Help).
This additional setting helps to avoid this problem.
Mind the Print Quality Settings!
Don't forget to set the desired print quality and color options
in the Print dialog. It's convenient to save the most frequently
used settings in the Presets list. See
print settings
for more detail.
Printing on Paper Without Gaps between Rows
On most business card stock cards follow each other closely, without
gaps. If you don't want to have trouble with printing on such paper,
make sure images and text are located at least 3 mm off the edges.
Then the slight printer imprecision won't spoil your business cards.
Use Paper Compatible with Your Printer
When choosing business card stock, make sure it's compatible with
your printer type. For instance, if you use paper with Glossy coating
(Magnetic even worse) in a laser printer, you may end up with broken
printer!
Printing on a Monochrome Laser Printer
When printing on a monochrome laser printer, avoid using too many
colors in the design — or there'll be no difference between, say,
the green and blue colors on the printout.
Laser Printers and Inkjet Printers
Inkjet and laser printer use different technologies to process
incoming data. To avoid printing problems (such as slow printing
or even program crashes), we recommend that you disable the “Print
card as raster image” option in the Business Card Composer
Preferences for laser printers. For inkjet printers
it's better to keep this option enabled.
Printing Images in High Quality
As the printer resolution is much higher, than that of the monitor,
you need to use high-resolution images to make sure they come
out well on printed cards. Try to use the largest possible image
- if it appears too big in Business Card Composer, resize it right
in the program till the desired size — then the print quality
will not degrade. Also, try to
use vector images whenever possible. For raster images, at least
300 dpi resolution is recommended.
A tip for HP laser printers
On some Hewlett-Packard printers paper feeding accuracy can be not
very good when using the default print settings. Most HP LaserJets
have driver settings where you can manually set the type of media in
the tray. Set it to "card stock" mode in the "printer features" panel —
the printer will feed the paper slower and the accuracy will be much, much better.
Valeriy Ryazanov
Last reviewed: April 2008
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Tips
for Printing Business Cards