Creating your own "mini" business cards - tutorial

I love Moo's minicards, especially for using as tags on jewellery boxes and bags. I love the fact that you can have as many different photos as you have cards without any extra cost, and I love the quality of them. However, I do not love the price, and, especially nowadays, I cannot afford to buy them in the quantity I need them! So, when I had a voucher recently to get some Vistaprint business cards at a cheaper price I thought I'd have a go at creating my own mini business cards. I expect that this is far from the first tutorial that has been written on how to do this, but this is how I did it!

First of all, these are the first set of cards that I ordered. I need three slightly different designs - one for my Notonthehighstreet.com shop with the name "Daisychain Designs" (I didn't want to use Daisychain Jewellery there as I didn't want the word jewellery on the postage labels), one for my Daisychain Jewellery website and etsy shop, and one for my Daisychain Extra components shop. I just ordered one lot first to try it out! This design is blank on the reverse as I use them as gift tags.

And this is how I made the image for my Daisychain Extra cards!

Note: I use Paint.net to edit my photos. It may not always look as pretty as Photoshop etc, but it does everything I need it to do, there's great online help for it  - and it's free to download!

1. Open up Vistaprint and navigate to where you can upload your own image for the premium business cards (I'm assuming here that the US version of the site looks much the same as the UK version!)

 2. Click on the "download a template" link to get up the window shown below so that you can see the pixel sizes you need. It's the document trim ones that are important.

 3. Open up Paint.net and click to get a new document. Change the pixel width to 1028 and the height to 579 (the document trim sizes). Vistaprint recommend that the resolution be set to 300 pixels/inch

4. Repeat step 3 to open a second document, this time at half the height (but the same width) as the first. You will be able to toggle between the two documents when you need to by clicking on the thumbnails in the top right of the screen.

5. Copy and paste onto the shorter blank document the images you want to use on your mini business card, resizing them to fit as necessary. Then click on the "rectangle select" button on the left and drag the cursor across your image to select it. Copy the image.

6. Paste the mini-business card image onto the larger blank document that you created in step 3, and paste it again so that you've got one image above the other. Save your hard work!

 7.Go back to the Vistaprint site and press the button to browse for and upload your image.

8. If, after you've uploaded it, important bits of information (such as your business name!) are partly outside of the dotted line, go back a couple of steps in Paint.net and resize the images you have used. I had to decrease the size of my logo slightly the first time I did this.

9. If you want text on the back, prepare a second image using the same pixel sizes as you did for the front of the card. Add text on Paint.net by clicking on the "T". You can change the font style and size in the same way as you would in any Microsoft office document.

10. And this is my reverse image uploaded!

If you have managed to stay with me throughout all those images, congratulations! I hope that you find this useful. You can use this method to create your own templates for most of the Vistaprint products. You can also, if you wish, create a template with two different images, one on each half, rather than using the same images for both halves as I did on my templates.

Jo Tinley
Daisychain Designs 

P.S. You also had a sneak preview of my new logos on this tutorial - I was hoping to have uploaded them onto my blog, etsy shops etc before I wrote this blog, but, well, it the Component of the Month reveal tomorrow, and playing with beads and wire is always a higher priority than website work - I'll do it next week!