Business card FAQs
- Collect from our SE1 HQ — free, usually ready in about 2 hours
- Same day delivery across London — from £45, about 90 minutes
- Next day UK-wide via DPD — £6.99
- Pre-10am next morning via DPD — £19.99
- Saturday delivery — £19.99
- With bleed: set your document to 91 × 61mm (85 × 55 plus 3mm all round)
- Keep text 3mm in from the 85 × 55mm trim
- Printed full colour CMYK, single or double sided
- 400gsm Recycled Silk — smooth coated card. Colour pops, photos stay crisp. The all-rounder, and where we’d point most people.
- 400gsm Brown Kraft — thick, textured, handcrafted. Colour prints noticeably more muted on brown, so design bold and high contrast.
- 400gsm Off White Textured — natural tactile texture, soft matte colour. Flatters muted palettes and clean type.
- Adds durability and scuff resistance — the card survives a pocket
- Makes dark, minimal designs look genuinely expensive
- It softens very bright colours slightly. That reads as classy on most designs, but if you want maximum punch on a vivid one, go without.
- Crop marks are not required. Welcome if they’re placed correctly — outside the bleed, never inside the finished size.
- Borders are the risky one. A thin frame sitting right on the trim will look uneven if the guillotine moves half a millimetre, and it always moves a little.
- The jump from 100 to 500 is smaller than most people expect — worth checking both before you decide, because the setup cost is the same either way.
- Multiple people in the team, each with their own details? Those are separate orders, one per person. Email us if there are a lot and we’ll sort the best way to run them.
- 300dpi at full size — a card is read at 30cm, so soft logos show badly
- Double sided? Send one PDF, two pages, front first
- Flatten transparency before you export
- Use the original logo file, not a screenshot of a website or a WhatsApp export
- Rounded corners — all four, or just two opposing ones
- Die-cut shapes — circles, squares, lozenges, or cut to follow your graphic
- Spot UV varnish — gloss on selected areas against a matt card. A varnished logo catching the light is the single most premium thing you can do to a card.
- Other laminations — matt or gloss as well as soft touch
- Other stocks — tinted, linen, laid and other textures
The bit they keep.
Everything else you print gets read once and recycled. A business card goes in a wallet and comes back out in front of someone six weeks later. It’s the only thing you print that has to survive being handled, pocketed and judged.
So we don’t do thin. Every card here is 400gsm — there is no flimsy option to accidentally pick. Three stocks, an optional soft touch velvet finish, single or double sided, printed and trimmed in Tabard Street with a 3pm cutoff.
How to order: pick sides, stock, lamination and quantity for an instant price, then upload artwork, design it free online, or let us design it for you. Every file gets checked by a human — low res logos, missing bleed, text too near the trim — before a sheet goes on the press.
Pick your card.
A smooth silk coating that makes colour pop and keeps photos crisp, on weighty recycled card. It suits almost any design — logos, colour, photography — which is why we’d point most people here.
Thick, textured brown card with a proper handcrafted feel — it means business the second it’s handed over. One catch: colour prints muted on brown, so go bold and high contrast.
A natural tactile texture you can feel before you’ve even read it. Understated and a little artisan, with colour printing soft and matte — which flatters muted palettes and clean type.
A velvet lamination over the Silk turns a good card into one people can’t put down — that involuntary thumb-rub and a quiet “ooh, that’s nice”. It also adds real durability and scuff resistance, so the card still looks new after a fortnight in a jacket pocket.
It makes dark, minimal designs look seriously slick, and it’s what makes the Silk our all-rounder.
Worth knowing: soft touch softens very bright colours a little. On most designs that reads as expensive. If yours is vivid and you want maximum punch, go standard.
Beyond the standard card.
All four, or just two. Opposing corners rounded and the other two square looks sharper than it sounds — a small change nobody else on the table has made.
Circles, squares, lozenges, or cut to follow the graphic itself. Geometric or completely irregular — if you can draw the outline, we can cut to it.
Clear gloss on selected areas only. Against a matt or uncoated card it’s striking — a varnished logo catching the light at an angle is the most premium thing you can do to a card.
Beyond soft touch. Matt flattens contrast for a modern, fresh look; gloss deepens it and saturates colour, which suits photography. Both protect against fingerprints and wear.
Tinted card in cream, ivory and pale shades, plus linen, onion skin and laid textures. Coated for punchy colour, uncoated for a natural look with softer contrast.
85 × 55mm is the convention, not a rule. Square, mini, or oversized all work — just remember a card that won’t fit a wallet is a card that gets left behind.
Not quite right?
When sustainability is part of the brand rather than a footnote. Sustainable materials, same size, same speed, and the stock itself does the talking.
A card says who you are; a flyer says what you do. A6, A5, A4, DL and square, six stocks, from £19. Order both together and collect in one trip.
The step up from a card. One sheet, up to six panels, folded and ready to use — room for a full service list or price breakdown without a bound booklet.
Let’s play by the rules.
Save as PDF/X-1a:2001 for the most accurate print. Can’t? No stress — PNG, JPEG or whatever you have works, and the artwork team will get in touch if anything needs fixing (or maybe just for a chat if they’re feeling lonely).
Finished size is 85 × 55mm. If anything runs to the edge, set the document to 91 × 61mm and let the background run out into that 3mm. No bleed needed if your design sits inside a white border.
Text, logos and borders at least 3mm from the trim. Cards are cut in stacks and stacks move fractionally — which is also why a thin border is the riskiest thing you can put on a card.
300dpi at full size. A card is read at arm’s length, so a soft logo is obvious. Use the original logo file — not one pulled off your own website, and never a WhatsApp export.
Drop shadows, glows and blend modes look perfect on screen and can do genuinely strange things on press. Flatten before exporting and what you see is what you get.
Keep type above 7pt on a card — 6pt is the absolute floor and it’s smaller than you think at 85mm wide. If the phone number needs a squint, the card has failed at the one job it had.
