Business Card Design Basics for Service Businesses

Photo by Artem Beliaikin on Unsplash

Do you still need a business card nowadays? I know a lot of people (me included) who don’t have them. If I meet someone that I want to connect with, I usually pull out my phone and either send them an email or connect with them on LinkedIn. For the tech startup industry, this is a fine way to go since we all have cell phones and are obsessed with them. For more traditional businesses, like service businesses, I feel it’s essential to have business cards.

Traditional Service Businesses

For this post, I’m only going to focus on traditional service businesses like landscaping, home cleaning, construction, plumbers, electricians, etc. The reason being that these service business physically goes to a person’s home or to business to perform the service. They also work in a local community so their span of business is more geographical than something like a freelance writer or editor who could work from anywhere around the world.

This is important because business cards are part of the marketing for geographically constrained service business. It’s common that these types of service business will leave their business cards at restaurants, apartment buildings, laundromats, and/or cafes. 

Business Card Dimensions 

Business cards come in a variety of types and sizes with the standard card size being 3.5 x 2.0 inches or 1050 x 600 pixels, assuming 300 PPI with the text horizontally. Most service-based businesses should stick with the standard rectangle card design because it’s the cheapest to make, the easiest to store, and has enough room for your information (more about that later)

Additional Business Card Shapes and Sizes

Like most things, business cards can come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes from round to folded to square, and all shapes in between. For service businesses, it’s not advisable to get fancy with the various options. If you do want to experiment, then consider some of the various shapes and sizes listed below:

• Vertical Business Cards: a nice variation if it’s at the standard size
• Square Business Cards: can limit how much info you can have
• Circle or Round Business Cards: hard to find a holder for
• Double-Sided Business Cards: nice for adding more info (see below)
• Folded Business Cards: can be annoying and get damaged
• Metallic Business Cards: expensive and awkward to handle.
• Multiple Back Images Business Cards: this is a nice feature if you want to try different things out.

All of these options will add costs and complexity to your business card design. I’d steer clear of doing anything crazy, especially if you are starting out. 

Modern Business Card Design

A modern business card has simple to read text with enough information for the potential client to contact you and look you up online. It’s best to design a card that is easy to read at a glance and is also easy on the eyes. Color and graphics play a big role in modern business card design because it’s simple and easy to add to a design.

Below are some examples that show the minimum required to put on a service business card. I used the standard size and a Canva business card template for both single-sided and double-sided. I used Canva because it’s an awesome design tool that is simple to use and has a ton of templates. You can also get a free account, which I highly recommend for any business. I did find a bunch of Google Docs Business Card Template but I found all of them lacking in flexibility, the ability to add graphics and design multiple cards.

Landscaping Business Card

Construction Business Card

Cleaning Business Card

You’ll notice that each of these cards is printed on the front and back with different background colors or images. They also have the same essential information such as name, phone number, email, and website. The Construction Business Card and the Landscaping Business Card also have the business address. That’s usually a good idea if you have to see potential clients but not necessary if you’re just doing the landscaping work. I have also seen social media accounts as well as links to review sites such as Yelp.

You’ll also notice that the fonts used on the business cards are easy to read but also have some style. There are a ton of business card fonts to choose from but the main rule that I use is to not use any more than two and preferably from a font family that works together. Thankfully, if you use a tool like Canva, they have lots and lots of templates with various fonts to choose from so that you can mock up a business card to see what it might look like.