Business Card Design with Adobe Illustrator and InDesign

1. Introduction Business Card: You want to know how to make a professional business card and get it ready for print. Perfect. This is exactly the course you are looking for. I'm Martin, I have over 20 years of experience as a graphic designer, illustrator, and ADB certified instructor. I have worked with companies like BBC, Disney, Google, Ikea, and I cannot wait to share my best practices with you. This is a streamlined hands on course focusing on a real life design project. I will be walking you through everything step by step, and you will get all the exercise files so you can follow. In case you prefer not to copy me, you can also follow my workflow using alternative assets provided and create something completely unique that you can showcase in your creative portfolio. I am pretty sure this course will inspire you to create something amazing. We will start in Adobe illustrator and design a clean and modern lobo, which we will use for the rest of the project. Next, we will set up a template and design the front and back of the business card and learn how to create engaging realistic mock ups of our final artwork to impress our client. Finally, we will learn how to use data merge in dB in design to betch produce multiple business cards for all the employees of our client. This is a massive time saver which can make a workflow much more efficient and professional. Besides all the technical stuff, we will also cover some important graphic design theory that you will be able to apply in any of your future creative projects. You can join this course without any prior knowledge in graphic design illustration or DOB applications. But to complete the project, you will need access to DOB Creative Cloud and the desktop or laptop computer. But now it's time to start creating, so I will see you in the next lesson. 2. Theory business cards: Business cards can be considered part of the identity design, since most of the elements defined in a brand guide, including the company's logo, the color palette typography will all be used on a card. However, it's such a standout and characteristic print product that it is worth talking about it separately. It has a long tradition dating all the way back to the 15th century, originally called visiting cards, and then later on trade cards. But compared to this, the standard sizes that we use nowadays are much smaller, and the advancements in printing technologies allows much more creative freedom when designing them. The two most common format for which we can see a few examples here on the board are landscape like these two right here and portray, for which we can also see a few examples. Business cards out of all the print products tend to be printed on the heaviest or thickest paper. This is to make sure that they are durable and they can handle the wear and tear. Besides the paper thickness for extra protection, lamination is almost always used, either mat or gloss. In case a business card needs to stand out, all the print techniques that we talked about can be applied like foil stamping and bossing. We can see a nice example here. Where the brand name or the logo is embossed and it actually shows up on the back, the reverse of the text. This is actually something I mentioned earlier on in another video that you just have to keep this in mind whenever you are using a print product where both the front and the back is going to be seen and used. But like always, it's not only about the special printing methods that can make a business card standout. It's mainly up to the designer's creativity, and we can see even a completely minimalistic design, can work really well. And in this case, it also seems like it's uncoated paper that was used to make it even more pure, simple, and natural. And in case of a business card, that actually can be an advantage because that will allow people to write on it. And if you ever been to an expo or exhibition where you met a lot of people and companies and you got so many cards from them, you may have also tried to write down some notes on their cards just to remember something specific that they mentioned to you. So in case of an uncoated paper, that's much easier to do. And also in case of a minimalistic design like this, it almost invites you to take some notes here in this empty frame. Another thing worth keeping in mind with business cards is that on the front, you want to reduce the amount of elements, and that can be a little bit more decorative. While the back of the card is where you have all the information. And since this is going to be slightly busier, you can reduce the amount of decoration here. And generally, it is also a good idea to keep one of the four corners pretty much empty. So that's a good proportion of negative space within a card. What you also want to make sure is that you have enough margin, so the text doesn't get too close to the edge. I would say that this is almost a bit too close to the edges, but it still works. Now, there's also a couple of terms that printers would say when it comes to printing business cards. This card, for instance, would be a one per one, which means one color on the front, one color on the back, which is black in this case. If you had nothing on one of the sides, that would be zero. In case you are using four color print on one side and only black on the other side, that would be four slash one. Full color front, one color on the back. By the way, this is also a nice example of a portrait format business card, which works really well with this vertical logo that can be scaled up because of this format. You can keep the information minimal on a business card, so just have the name, the job title or profession, and some contact detail. But in case you are including more information, you should still not exceed the standard seven elements, which would be the logo and the brand name, tagline, the full name of the person and job title, which in this case is actually missing. Contact details, including address, e mail address, website, and social handles. 3. Theory business cards - Interactions: Another obvious thing that most business cards would utilize is to have some kind of interaction between the front and the back of the card. So you would want to link the two sides to each other, either by using the same colors, similar elements, or similar typography, or you can include elements, like in this case, these blue pain strokes, that would almost feels like continuing from one side to the other when someone is turning it back and forth in their hand. The standard size for business cards in the US would be 3.75 " by 2.25 " with one eighth of a bled all around it. And for instance, in the UK, the standard size would be 85 millimeters or 3.35 " by 55 millimeters or 2.17 ". And again, the bleed size around all the edges would be 3 millimeters. And by comparing these two sizes, we can see that the US standard is larger. So it's wider but also taller, slightly. But whenever you are designing business cards for an international company, you might actually need to create multiple versions for the different sites around the world. Now, prior to the COVID 19 pandemic, approximately 7 billion business cards were printed every year around the world. And during the first year of the pandemic, it's estimated that the worldwide business card production fell around 70%. It's a huge drop, but, of course, it's understandable because most people didn't meet in person. However, the sales in 2021 already came back to almost the original numbers from before the pandemic. And last but not least, I wanted to show an example of a print on demand company who does exceptionally good business cards. It's more.com, which is available in several countries around the world. And the main reason I'm showing it is because it has a very good overview of the different types of business cards that you can get printed. So Straightaway, we have these categories for the standard format business cards, within which we can already make a distinction by introducing special materials, gold foil, raised spot gloss, even letter press business card. But they also offer square business cards and even mini cards, which are tiny business cards. And this is the format they're using, so it's a 70 by 28 millimeter card. And you can see, as I mentioned, the paper weight, even for the original or default format that they're using, is quite heavy, 350 grams/square meter, while their lx addition would be 600 grams/square meter. This thick paper is actually really nice. This is what we also use on our business card, In case you are planning to use a print on demand side like Mu, you will always be able to find and download their Disney's guidelines which you can use on your computer. I would normally recommend using Illustrator or in design, like we covered in the special printing techniques section, whenever you want to use any of these special finishes, you would need to supply two separate files, one for the artwork itself, and one for the special finish. But now that we cover the essentials that you need to know about business cards, let's take a look at an actual workflow where we are going to build a business card and illustrator, and then we will see how to use in design data merge function to generate all the different variations for all the employees for a company. 4. Business card workflow start: When it comes to designing logos, it's always recommended to start with sketches on paper. Or if you have an iPad, of course, you can use procreate or Photoshop on the iPad and do the sketches digitally. But I highly recommend not to start in Illustrator, even though this is the tool where we will end up in because you will be limiting yourself and you will probably end up creating less concepts and ideas than if you are just freely sketching, not paying attention to small details. Another week once we get to specialization and look at identity design and logo design in more detail, I'm going to show you how to approach this ideation phase and the process of turning your sketches into vector artwork. But for this project to keep things simple, I'm just going to design a logo as if we already have the designed direction. So the company is called New Hanover properties, and we can just put the text down here, so we have that ready. I like to keep the text in two separate text frames. That way, it's just easier to move things around and align them. And I'm going to use the font that I included in the exercise files. Called Hevits for the main name. And for properties, I am going to use Din 2024 regular. I will set this to all capitals in the character formatting options, and then selecting both of them, I will just increase their size and align them horizontally in the center. Okay. I think that's going to work quite nicely for us. And for the text, I would like to use this darker blue color. Of course, we can maybe use this other swatch as well just to have a subtle variation there. And by the way, the document called Logo Design start is where you will already have the swatches that I work with to make it easier for you to recreate this logo. Now, to keep things simple, I decided that this logo will be using very simple geometric shapes. So, let's start with the tree. We need the ellipse to afford that. And holding down the Shift key, we can draw this perfect circle. And we will actually need a duplicate of this. I'm just going to click and drag, and then pressing Shift X, I can swap the colors. So now we have a straw color to work with. And the straw color, I'm going to change to that darker blue. And then align these two to each other, but with a subtle offset. So I would like to create this type of offset. But I'm going to just have this shape selected and increase the thickness of the line a little bit more maybe 15 points in this size is going to work, and I'll just resize this shape also. Something like that will work nicely. Now, I will use the line tool and just draw a straight line from the bottom center point of this circle. Holding down Shift key, I can make sure it's going to be straight. And then using the hydroper tool why this line is selected, I can sample this other ellipse to get the same line thickness and also color. We can duplicate this line. Again, using the selection tool autor option key and drag it and then rotate it to the side holding down the shift key and just drag it out. This is going to be the ground in the illustration. I'm going to start using the stroke setting called round This is going to make the edges rounded, probably, I will need to reduce slightly the thickness. Now I can see that 15 points was a little bit too thick. Maybe 13 points is going to work better. Next, I'm going to draw a rectangle. For this, the shortcut is M on the keyboard, and then I'm going to draw this up. Here, this is going to be a building, and then we will need another one of this. But this one, I am going to slightly change using the direct selection tool. I will select the top right corner and then use the shift up arrows to move this up a little bit like that. And then before we add one more shape, let's just move this slightly to the right. We need another building. Again, I'm just going to duplicate this rectangle and just adjust it down to somewhere around. There, and we will add some field colors in here similarly to the tree. But first, I will also use another line. Again, just duplicating that one that we already had on the tree and then place it up here, and then click and drag to duplicate it. And there's a useful shortcut if you press command or Control D, after you duplicated an item, you can just keep repeating that step. So this way we could create multiple copies or instances of the same line. Finally, I would like to have another tree on the laf for which I'm going to duplicate these shapes. But for this one, I am going to also duplicate the circle one more time, and having these three selected together, I will use another tool called Shape Builder tool, which we covered in a lot more detail this week. And with this, I'm going to hold down the old key, and just click on these two sides. So this way, we will end up having two of these shapes. We only need one of them, and we can always resize this if we wanted to. Just make sure that the stroke size stays the same. So whenever you are transforming objects, make sure the scale strokes and effects is turned off. This is a feature that you will find here in the transform settings or in the transform panel. Or in case you accidentally change the size already. You can always select multiple objects and just set the stroke size to whatever you need. You can even type it in there. All right. So let's just move this back here, and I will actually move this down slightly like so. This tree can be slightly smaller, and we can move all of these objects slightly to the right. I accidentally move this line. So let's just set that back where it was. Now, let's create another rectangle, which we will use for filling in this detail with color. For this one, I'm going to press Shift X and then select this color for the fiel. And I will also send this to the back. So right click arrange, send to back. We can adjust this slightly, maybe we come down to there. Will do the same for this other rectangle here. Again, I will just duplicate this shape that we already used. And for this, I'm going to use this other red color. We will also need a field color for this shape here. So I will just duplicate it, press shift x, and then change to this darker red color. Again, let's move this to the back, arrange sent to back and maybe using the shift key. I'm resizing it slightly. So. And last but not least, let's create a field color for this shape as well. I will click and drag shift x to swap the colors and then use this lovely orange color, and I will just reduce the size a bit and again, send it to the back. There's a useful shortcut commando control shift left square bracket with which you can very quickly send details in the back. Let's just make this slightly smaller. Like that, and then maybe just select the top two points with the direct selection tool, I'm holding down shift key and just press upper a couple of times until it is the right size. And then just one minor thing that we can do here, having this shape selected, I will use the eraser tool. You can find this here in the toolbar or press Shift E. And while having this tool selected and the shape also highlighted, I will hold down alter option key and draw a rectangle around here to delete from that selection. 5. Business card - Water detail: Now, this logo could already work, but I feel like we can add some more flavor and interest by making it look like there's water underneath the buildings. So I'm just going to move the text down so we have more space here to work with. And first of all, I'm just going to duplicate one of these shapes, bring it down and then align it to somewhere around here, then press shift X to swap the colors. And then we will duplicate this stroke, and change the stroke color to white. Then we have to also make sure that this is on top of the block, so bring to front. And let's try to align it close here to the top line. Let's repeat this once again. But now selecting both of these jokes, we can make sure that we have an equal distance between them, and then just press command or Control D a couple of times until we have this pattern. Now, we don't actually need these lines. These were just used to create the gap between the white lines, and we don't actually need this last line. We just use it to align the shape to the edge of it, and then we can delete it. The main reason that we are using these lines so that now we can delete from them. For that, I'm going to use the scissors tool, press C on the keyboard, and then you can split these lines using the section tool, we can delete bits of it. There's a first split there. Then we can do another split maybe here. There. Again, delete this section by selecting it and pressing back space. Then one more we can do here. Once again, delete that bit there, and we can use the direct selection tool, select individual points, and then just move them around with the arrow keys on the keyboard. I'm going to repeat this on this other shape here. Again, using the scissors tool. I'll just crop into it here. Maybe move this more to the left. Then again, we can use the scissors tool, cut this shape here. And then cut it again there, delete the one in between, and then we can do another cut this way. And then let's just repeat this one more time at the bottom, cut this part out, and maybe another one here. So we can delete this again. And now we can just refine these lines so we can use the direct selection tool, and move these points around a bit just to make it a little bit more random like that can go there. This can go a bit further out. And I think this can be slightly smaller as well. And just move this whole thing further in the middle. And now, select all of these shapes together. Go to the object menu and choose Expand. Which will turn the strokes into field shapes, and then we can go to the window menu and choose pathfinder, which is similar to shape builder. But here we can just simply click one on this icon to subtract these white lines from the block of shape behind it. So this is now turned into a single object, a single compound shape, which will make it easier to work with. And now we can just switch to the eraser tool as Shift E, and holding down the old key, we can just chop bits off of this shape. I'm going to chop this part out. We can cut into it here, can cut into it there again. Then we can repeat the same thing on the right side. Chop that off, chop into it once again, chop a bit more off, and then maybe somewhere around here or maybe a bit closer inside. Okay. Now we can use the direct selection tool and make selection of the areas where we have sharp corners. So holding down the Shift key, I can add these to the selection. Again, adding these all in the selection. And once we have all the sharp corners selected, we can just drag one of these corner rigids until we create perfectly round corners. I feel like this is the only point here that ended up a little bit deformed, and that is because I ended up creating this shape a bit too close to the other rounded shape. So I can just undo this last step and then move these a little bit further out. Also, these ones can go a bit further out. And now let's just repeat that selection that we had and repeat the corner it's technique. And I think we now created a very nice water effect here, so we can move our text back. And we can make sure that everything is nicely centered by having everything here on the top selected and then grouping them together with command or Control G. Also, the text can be selected and turned into another group, again with the same shortcut. And then having both of these groups selected, we can just choose horizontal align center. This way, we make sure that within the groups, the objects are not moving when we are aligning them. It's just simply aligning the illustration with the type at the bottom. I think the name can be slightly bigger, so I will double click here to get inside the text and then holding down old and shift together, we can just increase the size a bit and then move it up. Yeah, I think that works well. We can add a little bit of space there in between, and I think we have our final design ready. So in the next video, we can move on and use this illustration on the business card. 6. Different ways to set up Business Card Design: All right. So here we are in illustrator, and I'm going to show you two different ways of setting up business cards. One of them is going to be using trim marks, and the other one is going to be using art boards with bleed on them because this is one of the first and most important aspects of setting up business cards to make sure that you have bleed around them. This is usually 3 millimeters extra edge that is printed to make sure that at the end in the final result, you have perfectly printed colored edge on the business card. And obviously, if you have white background, it doesn't really matter. But when you have color background or details patterns like these ones here in the corners, you want to make sure these are printed correctly. Let me show you first the trim mark setup. This is something for which you will need two separate rectangles. So I'm not going to talk about the actual sizing because it really depends where you are. There's different sizes used in the states, different sizes used in the UK and in the rest of Europe as well. So it really varies. And of course, you can also have vertical and landscape formats. So there's no point in really going through the sizes. But what's more important is to make sure you know how to set it up and get it ready for print. So the first thing is to have two rectangles added. One should be 3 millimeters bigger than the other one in all directions. Now, the way you can do this is once you have your actual print size, this is the red rectangle here. You can copy and paste that rectangle. Command C, command F or control C control F. Then I'm just going to set this one to a different color. And to make sure that this is bigger, I'm going to transform options, take off the chain, make sure that the center registration point is selected or reference point. Then for the width, I'm just going to type in plus six enter and then the same thing for the height plus six enter. There you go, there's the 3 millimeters extra. This means that we have three on top, three on bottom, and the same one left and right. I'm just going to copy this rectangle here on the right as well, so it's the right size, A align it to the center point. Now, if I start moving elements like these ones here, I can just drag and drop them and also resize them. This will be here on the business card and we'll have our logo in the middle. By the way, I would like to see who knows where these names are from the name on the right, and also, there's a hint here with the company name as well. You can let me know in the comment sections if you figured it out. But now that I have the elements in place, I can move the red outline on top of everything so just we can see it. This is going to be the detail where things will get trimmed. But to be able to print this out, we need that additional detail outside the red outline. That is why I'm going to select this red rectangle and I can actually select the other one here as well. And when I go to the effect menu and choose crop marks, both of these will be turned into the crop marks or an effect will be added on them, which will highlight where they will need to be trimmed. Once this is printed out, this is exactly where they will need to be trimmed. Now, having the trim marks here is great, but you have to be careful not to leave that red outline there, obviously. That's something you don't want to end up having in the print. So what I normally do is to move these red rectangles onto a separate layer. So I'm going to duplicate them. The ones that I keep on this print layer, I'm going to set to no visibility. So they are not visible, but the good thing about the trim marks effect is that those will still be visible, and they will also be printed. But once I have them set to invisible, I can copy them. And this is not necessary to do, but I quite like to have a separate layer with these duplicates on them. And you can see, I'm going to have these duplicates placed on that new layer. So now that we have them selected, I can set the stroke back to being red or any other color that you prefer to indicate where the actual card edge is. But this layer, I'm going to double click on this new layer and I'm going to turn off the print option. This is going to be just my card edge layer, which is not going to be printed. Whatever I have here is not going to be visible in the print. When I turn it off, this is actually what's going to be visible in the print. But while I'm working and if I want to see where the edge is, I can turn it back on. This is a safe way of setting it up, and I would even lock this layer so I can't move it around accidentally. The same goes for the trim marks as well. So if I find the trim marks, there's one, there's the other one. These can actually be also on a separate layer. So if I want, I can put them there and just call them trim marks. These can also be locked, so we don't again accidentally move them around. 7. Utilising Clipping Masks: Now, another thing that I would normally do, which just helps to keep things tidy is to create a clipping mask, and that's why I have this other rectangle here, which again, should be on top of everything else, and then by using the shift key, select everything else that is in the background or that is close to the edges of the design, and then use command or control seven, which is the clipping mask keyboard shortcut to define the area within which we want to see the illustration. So here in the layers panel, there's my clipping group. Within that, I can still select the objects. If I switch here on the top in the edit contents, or if I go to the group itself, I can still access these shapes and move them around freely, even rotate them, scale them. But now because they are in a clipping mask, it's much easier to see how it's going to look in print. Once again, if I turn off the card edge, that's what I would get in the final print, the printers will know exactly what to do with the stream marks they will be able to crop it like that. Now, the same goes for the right side as well. If I want it to have obviously the name on this side, and maybe again, the graphics from here, I'm just going to copy one of these patterns and paste, move it here on the right side, and then maybe have the logo as well on the top right. Normally, it's good to have one corner of your business card a bit more empty. At least from the four corners, one should be a bit more empty. Otherwise, it just feels a little bit too busy. I'm just going to copy this logo mark. Here, I'm not going to use the actual name of the company. I'm just going to use the logo mark, and let's just put it somewhere here. Nicely aligned to the name. It could even be here at the bottom if you wanted to. But I think that's should work nicely. But again, one important thing is I'm going to make sure that I create the clipping mask. That just helps me to visualize better what's going to end up in the final design. Once again, I select that rectangle, place it on top. That's command shift square bracket, or right click range and bring to front. Then shift click on the other object, and then command seven or control seven to create the clipping mask. Once again, we can check without and with the card edge. That's basically it when you're using the trim marks effect. But of course you can also rely on artboards to set things up in illustrator, and there's no real advantage in either of these. It's really a preference, whichever you would like to work with. I'm going to show you that as well. I am going to zoom out a bit and I will select one of these rectangles. Maybe one of the rectangles we have here. I'm just going to unlock. Copy that. I can even copy everything in here. Maybe that's an easier way of doing it. Just copy all of this. Old click or option, click, drag it down. Now that we have it ready there, I'm going to select that rectangle which we have for the trim marks. If I use the artboard tool, that's shift, that's the shortcut for it, all I have to do is to click anywhere here and then align it to that rectangle. That way we will have the artboard set up. Like that. And now that we have the artboard in place, we can go to the file menu and choose document setup because this is where we can set up the bleed. All I have to do is to increase this value up to 3 millimeters and once I click, we will see these red outlines on all of our artboards. This means when you're saving this as a PDF at the end, you will be able to include the bleed settings and you don't actually even need the trim effect here or the trim marks effect here. We can get rid of that rectangle. I got rid of the trim marks. Now, if I were to save this as a PDF and get it ready for print, I would do the following save as. From the file menu, choose PDF. In this case, I'm going to only save the second artboard, and then I'm going to click Save. In the settings here, I will go to marks and bleeds, make sure that the used document bleed settings is on and then turn on the trim marks. If I then save this PDF, it's going to generate the trim marks for us. 8. Business card data merge: We will be taking this to the next level, and we will actually generate all the different versions for the employees working at this company. So let's say the mockup that we designed last time or we created using the smart mockups website was convincing enough for the client and they love it, and they would like to have it all generated and ready for print. Let's say they have around 67 employees, and we need to send them all those versions with the job descriptions, the phone and e mail address, and all that jazz. Now, this is a fictional company obviously, and I came up with the names as well, or I didn't actually came up with the names. Some of you might know these people from somewhere. But yeah, so why am I an illustrator? And why did I start the whole project in illustrator if I already knew that I am going to work in in design. Because it's much easier to do the design itself in illustrator. While in design is great at doing the preparation or the PDF creation, thanks to its feature called data merge. And that's what I'm going to show you how it works. It's very simple. All you have to do is first of all, place in the artwork into an in design document. Now you can do this by exporting an illustrator file or an EPS file, and then just place it into in design. I even locked it so I don't accidentally move it around. And if I press W, we can see this is how it looks without all the outlines. So it has the tre marks already placed there. Thanks to the effect we used in illustrator. Notice that I removed the copy. I don't have anything here apart from the logo on the left. But on the right, we just have a text frame ready for the copy, the employee's name and all the rest of the information. But notice that I also have a panel here on the right code data merge. Now, if you don't know where to look for this, this is actually in the window menu, utilities data merge. These are probably a little bit more obscure, more advanced features that not many of you are familiar if you're already using in design, but haven't done these type of things before. So it's actually a very simple feature using data merge. Now, what you need for it, first of all, is a text file, an actual text document, and I'm going to show you this here on my screen as well. So this is the text file, and this is actually something you can export from an Excel spreadsheet or a Google spreadsheet. And all you have to pay attention to is that the first row first line has to have the names or the descriptions of each of these entries. So we start with the name, then then comes the next entry, which is the job title, and so on and so forth. You can even use data merge to include images. In those cases, you have to use the at sign, you would have to type in at and then the name of the file, let's say, it's something like dot JPEG, and you would have the fine name here, or I can just type in fine name This way, whatever fine name you define will be imported into your in design document using the data merge. But let's not complicate things, so I'm just going to delete this and we will just rely on the text at this moment. You can see that we have one, two, three, four, six people, six employees, and as I said, some of you might be familiar with these names. We will be importing this. But the way we have to do that is by coming back to the design document and go to the data merge panel menu. And choose Select data source. Once you click on that, you select the text file. It's important, it has to be a standard text file, so it cannot be a rich text format. Not an RTF, it has to be TXT file, or I think CSV also works, if you're exporting from Excel or Google Docs, once you click on Open, It's going to list all these entries here on the right. So we have the name, job title, e mail address phone number. Now I'm going to drag and drop these into my text frame, and I'm just going to zoom a little bit closer so you can see it better. So there's the name. And this is like a variable. So based on the information that we have in the text file, it will be able to replace this placeholder. So I'm going to press enter then drag and drop job title, press enter again, dividing the lines, e mail address, and then the phone number at the end. Now, I also can select these placeholders and format them. The best thing to do is to use paragraph styles for these. I already have a style that I defined for the details, and then for the name, I have a different style. There you go. Again, it's based on the styles that I established in Illustrator. I just used the Creative Cloud library, and then I saved the formating as a paragraph style in Illustrator, and I just brought it in here and in design. So you don't have to recreate anything. Most of the things you can just save into libraries. 9. Fixing data merge issues: Now that we have all of this in place, we can actually go back into the data merge panel and click on the preview, and this is such a cool feature. So once you click on the preview, notice that it replaces already these place holders, relying on the first line in my text document. So say the addler was the first one here, and all of the information comes in nicely divided and formatted the way I set up the document. So not only that, but I can also use these arrows to go through it, and I can spot already some issues. I can see that some of the names are too long, so they won't fit. So in this case, what I'm going to do is to resize things a bit. First of all, I need to make sure that I don't go too far here because the tram mark would chop it off. So I'm just going to put a guide in here so I can see exactly where the edge of this card is, and I definitely don't want to get close to that. So I'm going to keep my frame a little bit further away, something like that. Of course, we could even have a more defined grid if we wanted to. But for now, I think that serves the purpose, so I know exactly how much space I have. So instead, what I'm going to do is to move things a little bit around. First of all, this logo should go a little bit further to the left as well. Now, because I have this placed in it's an EPS file, and I have placed in into in design, there is a shortcut. If you option or old double click on the placed vector artwork, it will open up an illustrator and you can do the changes there. So I can move the logo maybe slightly to the left. Save this document. And then when I switch back to in design, it's going to already update itself. So we can see that it moved to the left. So we can also move this to align with it. But then I'm also going to change my paragraph style that I used on the name. By reducing the size here, we can get probably something like that is still going to work nicely. I think that's fine. Maybe we can also reduce the details size now because it just feels a little bit too big, so I can reduce that to 12 points. All right. So now let's have a look. I still have the preview option on. I can just go to the next name, Arthur Morgan. We have Dutch who has a quite long name. So let's just see if this fits in if I move this a little bit further. Okay, I think we can get away with that, his name is going to fit, and then we can check all the other ones and they are actually fine. So now I can see that all of the names are working. It's time to actually turn this into a PDF. So I'm going to save this document, and that's important. I'm just going to save it. Actually, we have to turn off the preview, then save it, and then use this little icon here on the top, the one's called create merged document. So once you click on that, it will give you a couple of options. First of all, how many of the records you want to include. So we can say we only want a single record, maybe we want the third one. Or maybe we want all of them, which is six in this case, so we can choose all records for that. Or a range, we can type in, let's say, two to four and six. So you can do even comma and then do it like that, just like when you export pages from in design, and you can also decide how many records do you want on a page? So you can even have multiple records on the same page. But in this case, I'm just going to stick to single record. There's obviously a lot of a door options here, but I don't want to go into too much detail. Let's just see what happens if you click k. In design is going to tell us that there was no issues, so there's no overset text when these pages were created. But when I click k, you will see here on the right side, we now have a new document with six pages. I can flip through these pages and I can see the final results. Everything is nicely imported. If I zoom out, we can also see here's the six pages 1 after the other. Now, the best thing about data merge is that obviously, I can now save this out as a PDF and it can go straight to the printer and they will be able to generate all of these ready for my client. But if there's a new employee joining or let's say another hundred employees joining, all I need is an updated version of that text file, and I can even just go back to the original file where we already have it all imported and just go to the drop down and choose update data source. So let's just try this out. If I go back to the text file and we put someone else in here, let's do Jose Matthews. I think his name was. Let's make him an advisor. Now if I save the text file, and I come back here, I can even turn on the preview, go all the way to the end. You can see that the last one is actually not him. But once I go to the drop down and choose update data source. Now if I go all the way to the end, there's actually now seven records, and we can see the name that we just added. It's very easy and quick to then generate new business cards for new employees joining the company. 10. Business card smartmockups: I wanted to also show you a really cool site on which I'm going to create a couple of mock ups for these cards. So the sign that I'm going to use is called smart mockups, and it's a brilliant site with lots of different mock ups in all kinds of different categories. So you will find digital print, apparel. And then once you choose the actual type of product that you want, in this case, we just select business cards. We will see 38 different mock ups at the moment. We can also filter for photos or isolated mock ups, which will have transparent backgrounds, and of course, we can also switch between free or premium. Now, most of the mock ups you will find here are premium. It means that you will have to pay monthly fee to be able to use the site. If you're interested to get their subscription, you actually get 20% off as a loyal. Yes, I'm a designer fan. So let me show you how it works once we upload the design. All we have to do is to select one of these. Let's just say I'm going to select this design here, and then I'm going to upload my design from my computer. And once it comes up, we can still crop it, and align it, we can scale it up and down as well until it gets to the right size. And once I say crop and continue, we can immediately see it in the mock up. But here comes the best part. If I want to see all the other mock ups, I can just cool down and immediately see all of them. If I want to check them out, I just click on it and boom there you go. I just love how easy it is to quickly switch between them and really find the best format that you can show to your client. There are some really nice realistic looking mock ups like this one as well. I just love how the shading and everything is created. 11. Conclusion: Well done for finishing this course. I hope you had just as much fun going through it as I had recording it. And of course, don't forget about the class project. Because remember, practice makes perfect. I can't wait to see your work, so make sure to submit it. And in case you like this course, and you would like to learn more from me, then there's plenty of other courses that you can find here. Go and check them out now. I can't wait to meet you in the next one.