Advice For Business Card Program?

Q: I am looking for a decent, easy-to-use program for designing and printing business cards (and if possible other small-sized items like labels). The ideal program would automatically scale the image to fit on a business-card stock for a laser printer, and would have internal, resizeable windows for the subareas of the card. Any advice sincerely appreciated

A: -I don't know of any "business card program" but whatever you choos, remember Photoshop is not for this sort of thing. To go to press you do not want your type bitmapped (which is what Photoshop does to type) Better to size and adjust your pic in Photoshop and then import into something like Quark or Illustrator where you do your type. -We prepress and print over a million business cards a year using Photoshop without any type difficulties what so ever and it is the only program of the group you mentioned that can accurately step and repeat business cards for offset bindery operations. Clients that submit business card artwork to our shop using above mentioned programs usually end up having the artwork redone. If you are laser or ink jet printing business cards your talking low end work as professional business card printing is done on 80 to 110 lb. stock. The prepared Avery business card stock is in the 40 to 60 lb. area and is unsuitable by professional standards. Business cards are the first impression of your business to a prospective client and anything short of a professional look is not a good idea. The problem people seem to have with text in Photoshop is understanding design resolution. If you design at 72 dpi your text is input at 72 dpi and is ragged. If you design your business card at 720 or 1440 dpi and input text it is clean and smooth and camera ready. It's when you start scaling text that the problem crops up because jaggies from low resolution input will never be clean, your just making them bigger.

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