How to impose business cards

The card's finished size is the trim size: 85 × 55 mm in much of Europe and Turkey, 90 × 50 mm in many other countries, 3.5 × 2 inches (88.9 × 50.8 mm) in the US. The file should be built at that size plus bleed — 3 mm on every side, so 91 × 61 mm for an 85 × 55 card — with text kept at least 3 mm inside the trim, where a slightly off cut cannot reach it.

There are two ways to space the cards on the sheet.

With a shared cut the cards touch, and one pass of the guillotine separates two neighbours. No bleed is needed between them because the cut line is shared; only the outside of the block gets bleed. It uses the least paper and the fewest cuts.

With a gutter each card keeps its own bleed and there is a gap of at least twice the bleed between cards, so every edge is cut separately. It costs paper and guillotine time, but a card whose background colour differs from edge to edge comes out clean even if the cut drifts.

Take an SRA3 sheet (320 × 450 mm) on a digital press that cannot print the outer 5 mm, and leave the crop marks aside for a moment. With gutters, the 91 × 61 mm cards fit 20 up one way and 21 up turned by 90°. With shared cuts, 85 × 55 mm cards and 3 mm of bleed around the block fit 25 up. Same sheet, same card: four more cards than the best layout with gutters, just from the way they are spaced.

That is why the count has to be checked both ways round and on every stock size the press can take — and then compared by the paper each card costs, not by the number up alone.

A double-sided card has to line up front to back. On an offset press this is usually work-and-turn: front and back on the same plate, the sheet turned side to side, two finished cards from every position. On a digital press the back is printed duplex, and the back layout is mirrored around the turning edge — the card in the first column of the front is in the last column of the back.

Front-to-back registration on a digital press can drift by a fraction of a millimetre, so a thin border close to the trim is the first thing to show it. A design that tolerates a little movement prints better than one that needs perfection.

Cards for a whole team are usually ganged: different names on the same sheet, the same stock and the same colours. Each name gets as many positions as its quantity needs, and the cut stacks are sorted by name afterwards. When the quantities differ a lot, it can be cheaper to run two sheets than to force everything onto one.

Crop marks sit outside the block, in line with the cut lines, and need their own room on the sheet — this is where the margin left after the gripper goes. With gutters there are marks for every cut; with shared cuts, one mark serves two cards.