Free business card maker
Design a card and get a print-ready PDF at 85 × 55 mm with 3 mm bleed and crop marks — the file a printer can actually use.
Free · No sign-up · Your file never leaves your computer
How to use it
- 1
Type your name, role and the details that go on the card.
- 2
Add a logo, pick a colour and choose a layout.
- 3
Leave crop marks on unless your printer asked you not to.
- 4
Download and send the PDF to the printer. Do not resize it.
When you would use this
A business card is a printing job before it is a design job, and almost every free card maker produces a file a printer will send back. Two things cause that, and neither is visible on screen.
Bleed. A card is printed on a larger sheet and cut down, and guillotines drift by a millimetre or two. Artwork designed to stop exactly at 85 × 55 mm therefore comes back with thin white slivers along the edges wherever the blade landed outside the line. The fix is to run any background colour 3 mm PAST the trim on every side, so a drifting cut still lands in artwork. That is why the page in this file is 91 × 61 mm and not 85 × 55 — the extra is deliberate, not an error, and you must not crop it out.
Crop marks. Having added bleed, the printer now needs to be told where the card actually ends. The four corner marks do that. They sit outside the trim line and stop just short of it, so they guide the blade without printing on the finished card.
The safe area is the third thing. Nothing important should sit within about 4 mm of the trim, for the same reason bleed exists: a cut that drifts inward will shave it. Text placed right up to the edge looks confident in a preview and looks like a mistake in the hand. This layout keeps text inside that margin for you.
Send the PDF as it is. The commonest way a correct file becomes an incorrect one is somebody opening it, printing to PDF again with “fit to page”, and quietly rescaling everything by a few percent — after which the trim marks no longer match the trim size and the printer has to guess. If your printer asks for the card without marks, or at a different bleed, turn the marks off and tell them the file is 3 mm.
One design note worth more than any of this: put fewer things on it. A card has one job, which is to be legible in someone's hand two days later. A name, a role, one number and one address is a card. Six lines of detail in six-point type is a leaflet.
Questions
- Why is the PDF bigger than 85 × 55 mm?
- That is the bleed — 3 mm of extra artwork on every side, so a cut that drifts still lands in colour rather than in white paper. It is deliberate. Do not crop it; the printer trims it.
- What are the corner marks?
- Crop marks. They tell the printer where the card actually ends, now that the artwork extends past it. They sit outside the trim and never print on the finished card.
- Can I send this straight to a printer?
- Yes. Send the PDF as-is and do not resize it. Re-printing it to PDF with 'fit to page' rescales everything slightly and the marks stop matching the trim size.
- My printer asked for no crop marks.
- Turn them off and tell them the file carries 3 mm bleed. Some printers impose cards themselves and prefer a clean bleed-only file.
- Why is my text not at the edge?
- There is a 4 mm safe area. A cut that drifts inward would shave anything closer, and text that touches the trim looks like a mistake in the hand even when the cut is perfect.
- Is anything I type sent to you?
- No. The PDF is built in your browser and nothing is transmitted or stored.
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