What Information Should Be on a Business Card? 6 Essentials

What Goes on the Back of a Business Card?

The back is where everything optional belongs, and on 16pt cards it costs nothing to use. Single sided and double sided print at the same price at every quantity, so a blank back is the most expensive empty space in print: you already paid for it.

Four things earn their place back there. A QR code pointing somewhere with a job to do, such as a booking page, a review page, a menu or a portfolio. A short service list, three to six lines, for a business people cannot describe in one title. Hours and a street address for a place customers walk into. And a second language version of the whole card, which is often the highest value use of the back for a business whose customers do not all read English first.

What does not earn its place is a repeat of the front. Printing your phone number and email a second time in a smaller size does not help anybody, and it burns the one surface that could have carried the QR code.

What Should Your Industry Add to the Card?

Add the one fact your customer would otherwise have to ask for, which is different in every trade. This is the short list we see most often across the country.

• Real estate agents: license number, which most states require on marketing, plus the brokerage name and logo, the service area, and a headshot if the brokerage style allows one.
• Contractors and home services: the trades you actually cover, a license or insured line, and a QR code to your reviews. A homeowner holding two cards picks the one that already answered the insurance question.
• Restaurants and cafes: address, hours, one social handle, and a QR code to the menu. Hours change, so print a season you can live with or leave hours to the QR code.
• Churches and nonprofits: service or program times, the address, and one line that says what you do for people who have never heard of you.
• Salons, barbers and personal services: the booking link as a QR code, one social handle, and your own name larger than the shop name, because clients book a person.
• Consultants and B2B services: a LinkedIn URL, a one line description of the problem you solve, and an assistant or scheduling contact if that is how meetings actually get set.
• Trades that get called at odd hours: one phone number, formatted large, with the words that tell someone when to use it, such as 24 hour service.

Pick one or two of these, not all of them. A card that answers the next likely question wins. A card that answers seven questions answers none.

How Small Can the Text on a Business Card Be?

Keep your name at 10 to 12 pt, your title and company name at 8 to 10 pt, and phone, email and website at 7 to 8 pt. Below roughly 6 pt a thin or script typeface starts to fill in on press, and the first line to go illegible is almost always the email address, because it is the longest string of small characters on the card.

Two rules travel with those numbers. Avoid hairline weights at any size on a business card, because a hairline is the first thing a press loses on coated stock. And avoid reversing very small type out of a dark background, since ink spread closes the gaps in letters that are already thin.

Should You Put a QR Code on a Business Card?

Put a QR code on the card when it goes somewhere the printed card cannot, and put it on the back at 0.75 to 1 inch square with a clear quiet zone around it. A booking page, a review page, a video walkthrough, a menu, a portfolio, a digital vCard: all of those are worth a scan. Your homepage is not, because the website is already printed on the front.

Give the code contrast and room. A dark code on a light patch scans from farther away than a code tinted in a brand color sitting on a photograph, and a code with artwork crowding its edges often will not resolve at all. Test the QR code on the digital proof with two phones before approval. If desired, make an actual-size printout to judge scale; we supply digital proofs, not physical proofs or material samples.

What Should You Leave Off a Business Card?

Leave off anything that will be false inside six months and anything that competes with the six essentials. A card is not a brochure, and the cost of an extra line is not ink, it is attention.

The usual offenders: a personal email address on a free mail service when you own a domain, a second and third phone number, a fax line, a long mission statement, stock clip art, a QR code with no destination worth scanning, and a home address on a card handed to strangers. Also leave off the year you were founded unless it is genuinely part of your pitch, and leave off a tagline that could belong to any company in your trade.

One practical filter: read the card out loud as if you were introducing yourself. Anything you would not say in that introduction probably belongs on the back or on the website.

How Do You Lay a Business Card Out So Nothing Gets Cut?

Build the file at 3.75 x 2.25 inches, which is the 3.5 x 2 inch card plus 0.125 inch of bleed on all four sides, and hold every word inside the 3.25 x 1.75 inch safe zone. The safe zone is where your six essentials live. Anything closer to the edge than 0.125 inch is a gamble at the cutter.

Beyond the guides, three layout habits do most of the work. Align the contact lines into one clean column or one clean row rather than scattering them into corners. Leave real white space around the name and the logo, because breathing room is what makes a card look printed rather than filled. And keep the palette to two or three colors from your brand, with a full color background if you want one, since a full color card costs exactly the same as a card with one ink.

If any of that is new, the standard business card size guide has the trim, bleed and safe zone numbers in inches, millimeters and pixels.

What We See on Proofs

The single most common correction we send back on a business card proof is the email address, and it is almost never a typo. It is a personal address on a free mail service printed under a company logo, or a contact line so small that the at sign and the dot close up on the gloss. Both are fixed in thirty seconds in the file and impossible to fix once the run is cut.

The second thing we see is the front that carries everything. Name, title, two phone numbers, an email, a website, three social handles, a tagline and a QR code, all crammed inside 3.5 x 2 inches, with a blank back behind it. When we send that proof back with the optional half moved to the back, the card gets easier to read without losing a single fact.

The third is contact text sitting right on the trim line, usually a website across the bottom edge. It looks balanced on screen because the screen has no blade in it. On a cut stack, the bottom two lines of the run come back shaved.

What Finish and Stock Should You Pick?

Pick 16pt cardstock for almost every business, and treat finish as a look decision rather than a budget one. Our standard card is 16pt full color gloss, and the thickness is what people feel in the handshake before they read a word of it.

Gloss makes color and photography pop and wipes clean. Matte reads calmer and is kinder to small type, and we quote it by hand rather than selling it on the order form. Metal is a different category entirely: brushed aluminum cards are for the meeting where the card itself is part of the pitch, and we compared the two in paper vs metal business cards. If you want to know what a point of thickness actually is, we measured it in 16pt versus 14pt cardstock. Both stocks sit side by side on the business cards page.

Whatever you pick, you see a free digital proof with every order before anything runs, production is 48 hours once you approve it, and cards are printed in the USA and shipped to all 50 states for a flat $10 per order. For pack prices and the per card math, see how much business cards cost, and before you place the order run through the 10 questions to ask before buying business cards. If you would rather we built the layout, start at design services or call (210) 293-5651.