How to Make a Business Card in Gimp

If you're like me, than you hate paying for things when it isn't necessary. I like to work around paying for things as much as humanly possible. So when I had the option of paying hundreds of dollars for Photoshop, and illustrator, I kindly turned the other cheek and searched the internet for another option. Through looking and looking, I landed upon Gimp. It basically does all the same things as Photoshop (assuming anyways considering I've never actually owned Photoshop to be able to compare), but I did read that it was harder to use than Photoshop, but was ready for the challenge since it was free. I love that word.

My goal this year is to really grow my blog and that involves attending blogging events, and that means having business cards to hand out to people. Then when I saw Janssen's amazing business cards the other day, it was all I could think about and simply just needed to have my own.

I searched the internet and could not find anything that was exactly what I wanted, and since you know, I'm cheap, I didn't want to pay someone to do it for me, so the only choice left was to design my own. Since I had a clear idea in my head of exactly what I wanted, I was able to draw it out on paper exactly beforehand, and then I just went to town on the computer to make it happen.

I ran into sizing issues when uploading the image 3 different times (continually too small each time), so I recommend going big from the get go and just doing 3000x3000 pixels. If someone who knows more about this stuff than I do is reading this, and you're shaking your head in horror, I'm sorry.

Before I show the step-by-step I want it to be known that I wanted square business cards (as you may have noticed from the pixel dimensions above), because I figured if a sponsor had 20 normal business cards in his hand, and then my obnoxious square one, the square would stand out right? And people with business cards want to stand out right?

K, Getting to the point... Step 1: Open Gimp, then File > New, your window should look like this:

Step 2: Change the width and height to 3000x3000, and click OK, your screen should now look like this: 

Step 3: Next, choose the color you want for the background, select the bucket tool, and then click in the big white square. You're screen should now look like this: 

Step 4: I wanted a circle cut out of my logo with white in the background. Using the ellipse select tool, I cut out my circle and then used the color change and bucket to fill it in white: 

Step 5: I put my logo in the middle by selecting the text tool, choosing my color, picking my font, and sizing and centering it in the circle: 

Step 6: I wanted to put my "catch phrase" or whatever you would like to call it under the circle so using the text tool, and changing my font and color again, added it underneath: 

Step 7: I was done with one side of my card at this point and so I had to save the picture, you would think this is easy but... click file > export to > then change the file name, chose the folder location, then click export: 

Step 8: I don't really know what this step does exactly, but just make sure the compression slide bar is all the way to 9 and then click export and your file is saved.

At this point you are done with the first side and can now "x" out of everything and then repeat the first two steps so that you're looking at a big white square again. 

This side I wanted to be all white, and then I wanted the colors I used on the front to be my font color on the back. This was simple, I used the text tool, selected my color, font, and size and then wrote my name and centered everything up again, and then picked another color, font, and size to do all my information and then centered it all up again as well. Using the above steps, this part should be easy. And here is my finished front and back:

I then got these printed through iprint.com, and then learned their quality was super poor and cruddy, so I then decided to go local and print through Alphagraphics, still cheaper in the long run! I hope this helped someone and let me know if you have any questions!