Which card stock should a business card be printed on?

Card enquiries arrive in a recognisable shape: a PDF attached, a quantity, a date, and one specification question left open. How thick. Laminated or not. Square or rounded corners. One side or two. Four decisions settle the job — weight, finish, shape and size — and a fifth question runs underneath all of them, which is how much of that specification fits inside the deadline.

The standard business card stock here is 350 gsm uncoated high-white, thick enough to hold a clean edge in a wallet, and the heaviest sheet we run digitally is 400 gsm artboard. Where thick card stock is the point of the brief, the trade to understand is that weight above 400 gsm changes the route rather than the sheet: 450 gsm laminated litho cards, with square corners and a gloss or silk laminate, are printed litho and take three working days from approved artwork and payment, so they are not a same-day product.

Weight in gsm is grams per square metre, which is mass rather than calliper: two stocks at the same gsm can differ in thickness and stiffness depending on how the board is made, so the number sets the class of card rather than a measured thickness. Lighter is a real choice too. Cards, invitations and tent cards run on 300 gsm, while 350 gsm is the weight that reads as a card with something behind it. The full range of what we keep on the floor, with grain direction and sheet sizes, is in our paper stocks guide.

Uncoated 350 gsm takes a pen, so a mobile number can still be written on the back. On a laminated card, whether a pen writes on the surface depends on the film and the pen rather than on the weight of the board; gloss lamination gives depth of colour and shows fingerprints more readily than matt. Soft-touch, also sold as velvet, adds the same protective layer with a tactile surface. Lamination is a finishing step rather than part of the printing, which is why it has its own place in the schedule: simple unlaminated cards can be printed while you wait, and digitally printed laminated cards take about three to four hours to finish. Litho cards are a separate route with a separate lead time, further down this page.

Rounded corners are cut on a die-cutting machine at a 6 mm radius, and the shape has to reach us as a separate spot layer in the file rather than as an outline drawn on the artwork layer. Foil works the same way: anything cut or foiled needs its own path. Square corners need nothing extra, and are what the 450 gsm litho cards come with.

Standard sizes are 85 × 55 mm in the UK and 89 × 51 mm in the US, and square cards are printed on request. Say which one the artwork is built to, because a file that is a few millimetres out is a question that has to come back to you before anything can be printed.

Single and double-sided are both ordinary work, and the reason to state it in the first email is the same: a card described only as “the attached PDF” can be read either way. What turns a same-day job into a next-day one is almost never the printing — it is a question that has to go back to you and sit unanswered while the afternoon passes.

Simple unlaminated cards run as wait-and-print work, digitally printed laminated cards take about three to four hours to finish, and spot UV or foil take three to five working days. Printing a straightforward digital card is roughly an hour of the total; what moves the rest is the finishing step that comes after it. Two other routes carry their own clock: 450 gsm laminated litho cards take three working days from approved artwork and payment, and a stock we do not keep on the floor has to be ordered in rather than pulled off the shelf, so availability and the completion date for the cards are confirmed at quotation. Every timing on this page is a typical range confirmed at quotation against the queue on the day, not a promise made in advance.

Production at our London print shop runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so the working day is not the limit on the schedule — the finishing is. Files and payment in by 21:00 go into overnight production for delivery in London before 9am the next morning, subject to that night’s capacity and to the specification qualifying for it — litho cards, spot UV and foil do not, because their own lead times are longer than a night. That overnight route is the one printing at night and overnight printing describe in full. A direct courier across Central London is usually about an hour on the road once the finished cards are bagged, with same-day delivery across the city including the City of London, Canary Wharf, King’s Cross and Shoreditch; the rest of the UK is next-day delivery once the cards are made. One copy is a normal job. Where the deadline itself is the problem rather than the specification, urgent print jobs and 24 hour printing cover what is possible, and same day or next day is worth choosing deliberately rather than by default.

Business card artwork needs 3 mm of bleed on every edge with crop marks offset by 3 mm, text kept 5 mm clear of the trim, CMYK colour, and raster images carrying 300 dpi at the finished printed size. Effective resolution is the pixel count divided by the size the image is printed at, so enlarging a logo exported for a website without resampling lowers it; resampling adds pixels but not detail. Vector artwork — type and most logos drawn as vectors — carries no resolution at all and stays sharp at any size. Export a valid PDF/X-4 with fonts embedded or converted to outlines and images embedded, and check the exported file rather than trusting the preset.

• Bleed 3 mm on every edge, with crop marks offset by the same amount, so nothing running off the card leaves a white hairline at the cut.
• Text 5 mm clear of the trim, because trimming moves by a fraction of a millimetre across a run and type on the trim line looks uneven from card to card.
• CMYK, with Pantone references for brand colours — bright RGB blues and greens sit outside the CMYK gamut and print duller than they look on screen.
• A cut or foil shape on its own spot layer, not drawn on the artwork.
• Clear space and contrast around a QR code, or a phone will not read it off the printed card.

Checking a logo takes a minute in our preflight checker, which reads the pixel dimensions in the browser, without uploading the file, and returns the largest size that image covers at print resolution. Which format to export, and what each one carries, is in what file format is best for printing. Send what you have in any case: every file is checked here before production, and where a fix is small it is usually just done.

Cards fail on the same handful of things, and none of them are exotic. A logo pulled from a website and enlarged. Artwork built to the finished size with no bleed behind it. A phone number set hard against the trim. A brand blue picked in RGB. A QR code shrunk until the scanner gives up. A rounded-corner path drawn on the artwork layer instead of supplied as a spot layer, which means the cut has to be redrawn before the job can run.

One more is specific to heavy stock: a card that folds — a folded card or a tent card rather than a flat business card — can crack along the crease if a heavy uncoated stock is folded across the grain, showing a white line through the ink. Grain direction is in the paper stocks guide, and it is worth a sentence in the brief whenever the piece folds.

• Weight — 350 gsm as standard, 400 gsm for a heavier card, 450 gsm litho if the schedule allows three working days.
• Finish — unlaminated, matt, gloss or soft-touch, with spot UV and foil planned three to five working days ahead.
• Corners — square, or rounded at a 6 mm radius with the shape on its own layer.
• Size — 85 × 55 mm as the UK standard, 89 × 51 mm as the US one, or square on request.
• Sides — single or double-sided, stated rather than implied.
• Quantity, and whether letterheads or compliment slips are printing at the same time — printed together, the colour is matched across the set.
• The date and time the cards have to be in your hands, not the date of the meeting.
• Whether you want a proof before the run.

Every job is quoted on its specification, so the weight, the finish and the corners all move the figure — quantities and prices are on the same day business cards service page, and what drives print prices generally is in how much printing costs in London. Where the cards are one part of a set, flyers and leaflets are printed on the same site and can go on the same order.