Business Cards:

Business cards are an important factor of any business process. An entrepreneur introduces himself with the help of the business card. The business card contains all the vital information of the entrepreneur and helps him in formally introducing himself to his client or a fellow businessman. The business card often has details like the entrepreneurs name, name of his company, residential and official address, telephone numbers, cell numbers and email-address. Conventionally the business cards were very simple and plain and normally had only colors two colors, namely black and white. However, now the business cards are increasingly becoming visually attractive with the use of many colors and images.

The modern business sector works very rapidly and aggressively. To be able to keep pace with it, entrepreneurs need to resort to extremely powerful and effective mans to make their presence felt and establish immediate contacts with clients and other entrepreneurs. Hence, the business cards must speak very strongly about the character of the entrepreneur. For this, the entrepreneur must follow some basic strategies that would help him immensely in the course of his business.

Business Card Strategies:

It is important that entrepreneurs follow certain basic strategies with respect to their business cards. The strategies are as follows:

1) Promotional business cards: It is important to make the business card interesting. Instead of making conventional plain business cards with the same basic information, entrepreneurs can add some promotional offers on the cards to increase their sales. For upcoming entrepreneurs who are in the pursuit of having a share of the market can promote their company by adding a lucrative promotional offer on his business card itself.

2) Survey Card: Often entrepreneurs need to conduct a market survey before launching a new product. To gauge the sensibilities, tastes and preferences of the consumers, the entrepreneur can print a survey card and request the client to return the card by answering the questions the next time. This way the card would effectively help the entrepreneur in establishing his domain and also get acquainted with the market.

3) Make business cards as appointment cards: Entrepreneurs can use their business cards as their appointment cards too. They can print their details on the face of the card and on the rear provide some options for those who would like to take an appointment with the entrepreneur. They can leave blanks against options like appointment day, date and time, which the client or visitor can fill and return to the entrepreneur.

These are some of the major tips that entrepreneurs can use to make their business cards effective. Apart from these, even colorful cards are very effective and are used extensively by businessmen. The basis of this is four-color business cards.

First Brush:

There are four basic colors that are used in the process of printing business cards. These colors are cyan, magenta, yellow and black. They are often referred to as CMYK colors and the process is known as the CMYK four-color printing process. When cyan, magenta and yellow are combined and printed together on white, the resultant color is black. To have full color business cards or to make business cards having large number of colors, the CMYK process is used. In this every color in the quartet is printed one on top of other. This results in creating a whole range of colors for the individual to choose from for his business card. When an entrepreneur wants to make his card in a specific color then the four basic colors are manipulated in a specific way to obtain the color and the shades.

Four-Color Printing Process:

Most conventional business card printers use the following methods while manufacturing four-color business cards:

1) The first step involves positioning the inks of the four colors on the paper that would be used for making the card. There is a specific way in which these inks are positioned. The colors are put in different layers made of dots or points.

2) The most important step in this is to transform the artwork for the business card into the color space of the four colors. This is crucial as it enables in segregating the files according to the four colors.

3) This segregation of files on the basis of the four colors is necessary to make an independent printing plate for each of the four colors.

4) During the process of segregation, a color image is divided into the four colors. This is done with the help of special filters and screens. In most of the cases, only digital technology is used.

5) The colors are simply placed in an overlapping state in order to create innumerable other colors.

6) The four-color cards are printed using the SWOP technology. SWOP refers to Standard Web Offset Press. This is very crucial for accessing a large number of facilities.

Some Basic CMYK Tips:

During the process of four-color business card printing, the following tips are very important and must be focused on:

1) While using images for CMYK procedures it is advised to use TIFF or EPS formats. These factors are significant to preserve the colors and clarity of the images on the cards.

2) It is very important that the images are scanned using 300dpi resolution. This has to be the resolution at the final dimension.

3) While using the colors it is necessary to have adjustments, which can help in manipulating the boost contrast and saturation in the images.

CMYK or four-color process for business cards has become a very common feature in several countries. In fact in the US, most color business cards are printed using the CMYK process only. They provide a large number of colors and also good image quality for the satisfaction of the entrepreneurs.