Ensure you have the page rulers showing, View > Show Rulers. Ensure your rulers are set to inches, Edit > Preferences > Units and Rulers. Now click and drag the guides from the ruler bars.
Adobe Photoshop
TUTORIAL
You can download our pre-formatted start file
» Business card start file
» Postcard start file
» Letterhead start file
» Compliment slip start file
» Label start file
Or create your own file from scratch
For business cards, create a new file 3.58" x 2.4" at a resolution of 300 pixels/inch. color mode should be CMYK. For postcards the size should be 5.96" x 4.25".
Page sizes for other products can be found here.
Trim and text area
For business cards create guides 0.1" and 0.24" from each edge, and for postcards create guides 0.06" and 0.18" from each edge.
How do I do this?
Now click in the ruler at the top and drag down a guide to 0.1" into the page, and let go. Do this again at 0.24" down, 2.17" down and 2.28" down. Click in the side ruler and drag to 0.1", 0.24", 3.35" and 3.46" across.
Your document should now look like this. (This is a business card.)
You are now ready to create your design within this template.
Please note, nothing should extend to the outer edge of the document other than items that extend right to the edge of your cards, like a background color or all-over image for example. For more information on "bleed", please refer to our file preparation tutorial.
The first guide lines (0.1" for business cards or 0.06" for postcards) show where the cards will be cut. The inner guides (0.24" for business cards and 0.18" for postcards) show the 'safe' area for your design. You should try to keep your all your text and images within the inner guides to avoid the possibility of anything on your cards being 'clipped' when we cut them.
Avoid scaling up images. If an imported image is too small, scaling up will reduce the resolution and therefore the quality.
Very fine text, rules and keylines should be avoided.
Saving your artwork
When you are happy with your design, save the file as an Adobe Photoshop (.psd) file. This is your back up in case you need to make alterations at any time in the future. This file cannot be uploaded.
Flatten any layers you may have (Layer > Flatten Image).
Select File > Save As and Choose JPEG.
Quality should be set to 12, Maximum, and Format should be Baseline 'Standard'. The Preview box should be unchecked.
