Using Publisher To Design And Print Business Cards: Fill & Download for Free

I got my job as a designer without going to design school.I wanted to change careers and become a designer, but I didn’t have four years and $100k to go back to school. So I decided to teach myself. At first, I had a lot of doubts on whether someone could teach themselves well enough to get a job.If you’re wondering the same, the answer is yes.I hacked together my own design education in 6 months while working a full-time job. I didn’t think I was ready but started applying for jobs anyway — and got a job at a great startup, Exec.I’ll admit, I’m nowhere near as good as many design prodigies that come out of a 4-year education at an elite school. But I’m definitely good enough to do my job well. I design a pretty wide range of things — for the website, iPhone app, emails, social media, and print.Maybe you want to change careers and become a designer full-time.Or you just want to learn some basics for your startup or side project.This is a guide to teach yourself design.Update: I first published this answer over a year ago. Since then I’ve gotten hundreds of emails asking for more guidance and easier to follow steps, and I finally found one: Designlab. This course wasn’t around when I was learning, but man do I wish it was – it would have made the whole process a lot less daunting. What I really like about it is that it gives you project assignments, and then connects you to a design mentor who gives you feedback (they have really good ones who work at Facebook).Step 1. Learn to seeThe biggest mistake is jumping into Photoshop too fast. Learning Photoshop does not make you a designer, just like buying paintbrushes doesn’t make you an artist. Start with the foundation.First, learn how to draw.You don’t have to sit in a room with a bunch of other artists trying to draw a naked woman.You don’t even have to get that good at drawing. Just learn some basics so you can be comfortable sketching with a pen.You only have to do one thing to learn how to draw: get the book You Can Draw in 30 days and practice for half an hour every day for a month. I’ve looked at a lot of drawing books and this is one of the best.Learn graphic design theoryStart with the book Picture This. It’s a story book of Little Red Riding hood, but will teach you the foundations of graphic design at the same time.Learn about color, typography, and designing with a grid. If you can find a local class to teach the basics of graphic design, take it.Go through a few of these tutorials every day.Learn some basics in user experienceThere are a lot of books about user experience. Start with these two quick reads that will get you in the right mindset:The Design of Everyday ThingsDon’t Make Me Think!Learn how to writeDon’t fill your mockups with placeholder text like Lorem Ipsum. Your job as a designer is not just to make pretty pictures — you must be a good communicator. Think through the entire experience, choosing every word carefully. Write for humans. Don’t write in the academic tone you used to make yourself sound smart in school papers.Read Made to Stick, one of my favorite books of all time. It will teach you how to suck in your readers.Voice and Tone is a website full of great examples of how to talk to users.Learn to kill your workThis is the hardest step in this whole guide.Be prepared to kill everything you make. Be prepared to violently slaughter your precious design babies. The sooner you can embrace this, the better your work will become. When you realize your work isn’t good enough, kill it. Start again.Get another pair of eyes. Ask for feedback on your work from people who care about design. Don’t know anyone? Make some designer friends — go to designer meetups and events.Get the opinion of people who don’t care about design, too. Show your work to people who would be your users and ask them to try your website or app. Don’t be afraid to ask strangers — I once took advantage of a delayed flight by asking all the people in the airport terminal to try out an app I was designing. Most of them were bored and happy to help, and I got some great usability feedback.Listen. Really listen. Don’t argue. If you ask someone for feedback, they’re doing you a favor by giving you their time and attention. Don’t repay the favor by arguing with them. Instead of arguing, thank them and ask questions. Decide later whether you want to incorporate their feedback.Step 2. Learn how to use Photoshop and IllustratorHooray! Now you’ve got a pretty solid foundation – both visual and UX. You’re ready to learn Photoshop. Actually, I recommend starting with Illustrator first and then moving on to Photoshop after. Illustrator is what designers use to make logos and icons. InDesign is good for print design like flyers and business cards.Learn IllustratorThere are a ton of books, online tutorials and in-person classes to learn Illustrator. Choose the style that works best for you. Here are the books I found especially helpful to learn the basics of Illustrator:Adobe Illustrator Classroom in a Book – It’s boring, but if you get through at least half of it, you’ll know your way around Illustrator pretty well.Vector Basic Training – This book teaches you how to make things in Illustrator that actually look good.Now for the fun stuff! Follow these online tutorials and be impressed by what you can make. Here are two my favorites – a logo and a scenic landscape.Learn PhotoshopThere are a million and one tutorials out there. A lot of them are crap. Fortunately, there are sites with really high quality tutorials. PSDTuts by TutsPlus is one of them.Here’s a good photoshop tutorial to make an iPhone app.Here’s another good photoshop tutorial to create a website mockup.Carve out an hour or two every day to go through some tutorials, and you’ll be impressed by how quickly you progress.Step 3. Learn some specialtiesDo you want to design mobile apps? Websites? Infographics? Explore them all, and pick and choose the ones you enjoy to get better at them.Learn Logo DesignLearn how to make a logo that doesn’t suck: Logo Design LoveYou’ll want to take it a step further than a logo though. Learn to create a consistent brand – from the website to the business cards. Check out this book, Designing Brand Identity.Learn Mobile App DesignStart with this tutorial to get your feet wet on visual design for mobile apps.Read this short but very comprehensive and well-thought out book on iPhone design: Tapworthy. It will teach you how to make an app that not only looks good but is easy to use.Geek out on the apps on your phone. Critique them. What works and what doesn’t?Learn Web DesignRead Don’t Make Me Think to learn how to make a website that people find easy to use and navigate.Read The Principles of Beautiful Web Design if you want help making a website look good.Make a list of the websites you think are beautifully designed. Note what they have in common. Some great examples are on SiteInspire.Now for the hairy question of whether you need to know HTML/CSS as a designer: It depends on the job. Knowing it will definitely give you an edge in the job market. Even if you don’t want to be a web developer, it helps to know some basics. That way you know what is possible and what isn’t.There are so many great resources to learn HTML and CSS:My favorite free one is Web Design Tuts.My favorite paid one (pretty affordable at $25/month) is Treehouse. If you’re starting from the beginning and want someone to explain things clearly and comprehensively, splurge for Treehouse tutorials.Step 4. Build your portfolioYou don’t need to go to a fancy design school to get a job as a designer. But you do need a solid portfolio.How do you build a portfolio if you’re just starting out for the first time? The good news is you don’t need to work on real projects with real clients to build a portfolio. Make up your own side projects. Here are a few ideas:Design silly ideas for t-shirts.Find poorly designed websites and redesign them.Got an idea for an iPhone app? Mock it up.Join a team at Startup Weekend and be a designer on a weekend project.Enter a 99 designs contest to practice designing to a brief.Do the graphic design exercises in the Creative Workshop book.Find a local nonprofit and offer to design for free.Resist the temptation to include every single thing you’ve ever designed in your portfolio. This is a place for your strongest work only.Steal, steal, steal at first. Don’t worry about being original – that will come later, once you are more comfortable with your craft. When you learn a musical instrument, you learn how to play other people’s songs before composing your own. Same goes for design. Steal like an artist.Go to Dribbble for inspiration on some of the best designers. Check out pttrns for iOS inspiration, and siteinspire for website inspiration.Step 5: Get a job as a designerWhen I first started learning design, I went to a job search workshop for designers. I walked into a room full of designers who had much more experience than I did – 5, 10, 15 years experience. All of them were looking for jobs. That was intimidating. There I was, trying to teach myself design, knowing I was competing with these experienced designers.And yet less than a year later, I got a design job. There was one key difference between me and many of the other designers that gave me an edge: I knew how to work with developers.The biggest factor to boost your employability is to be able to work with developers. Learn some interaction design. Learn some basic HTML and CSS. Designers in the tech industry (interaction designers, web designers, app designers) are in extremely high demand and are paid well. That’s where the jobs are right now.If you don’t have any experience working with developers, get some. Go to Startup Weekend, go to hackathons, or find a developer through a project collaboration site.Make a personal website and make your portfolio the centerpiece.Go out and make serendipity happen – tell everyone you know that you’re looking for a job as a designer. You never know who might know someone.Research companies and agencies you might be interested in. Look on LinkedIn for 2nd and 3rd degree connections to people who work at those companies and ask for intros. The best way to get a job is through a connection. If you don’t have a connection, there’s still a lot you can do to give yourself an edge.Once you’ve got the job, keep learningI’ve been at Exec for a year now and have learned a ton on the job. I seek out designers who are much more talented than I am, and learn from them. I find design classes (good online ones are Skillshare, General Assembly, Treehouse, and TutsPlus). I work on side projects. I geek out at the design section of bookstores. There is still so much to learn and to improve on.Keep your skills sharp, and always keep learning.“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” ― Ira GlassThis article was originally published on Karen’s blog.

Non-traditional business cards aren't really a problem for me. I like receiving a well-finished and tastefully designed card that wasn't thrown together as quickly and as cheaply as possible. However, there are a few things that I expect (maybe I'm nitpicking, but it makes a notable difference):ShapeThe shape of the business card is important. It should be able to fit in my wallet and/business card book without having to cut things off. Any business card I am handed that is shaped like a star gets discreetly thrown in the bin at my earliest convenience.DesignDo you want me to take you and your work seriously? Great. But since you have just handed me a home-printed business card that was so obviously designed in Publisher and then cut by hand, I am not likely to take your work seriously at all. It doesn't save much money over getting them properly designed and printed, so this home-made cost-cutting measure just makes you look cheap.ReadabilityIf you hand me a business card that's so over-designed that I cannot distinguish between alphabetical characters and those beautiful flowery patterns that adorn your background, then despite my best efforts, I regret that I must dispose of it.Same goes for business cards that are all one colour with the text in gloss - I can't read it in low light, so I don't have much use for it. Working late nights in the office takes enough out of me without having to squint to see your otherwise awesome business card.Bottom line:A business card says a lot about you, your company, and your career. No company that is worth dealing with will enter information in a Publisher template and call it a business card - and they will only print it in-house if they are actually a company that does such things as a service.While fancy shaped business cards can look really attractive, they don't necessarily fit in places where normal people could reasonably be expected to store them. For this reason, people with such cards look self-entitled to me. That certainly makes them noticeable, but for the wrong reasons.

Steps to start publishing company in any country.​1Create a name for your publishing company. Once you have come up with a catchy name, develop a logo design, which will represent your company on all marketing pieces, including business cards, stationary, e-mail marketing pieces, and your website.​2Create a business plan and philosophy for your company; this is a critical step in really knowing how to start a publishing company.Most successful publishing companies specialize in a certain type of book (e.g., books on spirituality, on self-improvement, children's books, romance novels, and UFO and science books). Having a niche in the marketplace is an important aspect of knowing how to start a publishing company.​3Research the local requirements for setting up a business in your area, including any licenses required and taxes on small businesses.​4Find a reputable printing company that knows how to print and physically put a book together on a budget.​5Find manuscripts that are worth publishing via literary agents and open submissions.​6Find a talented graphic designer who can prepare a book for printing using a publishing software program like Quarkxpress, Adobe Framemaker, or Adobe InDesign.​7Find a good editor and proofreader to thoroughly review manuscripts before publication. Typos and bad writing are the mark of an amateur � all materials must be proofed and corrected before publication.​8Submit an application to the U.S.Copyright Office for a copyright for any original manuscripts​9Apply for ISBN (International Standard Book Numbers) numbers from the United States ISBN Agency. Once a new book has been given an ISBN, the book title, with ISBN, should be registered at www.bowkerlink.com​10Sign up with a reputable book distribution company. Book distribution companies work with publishers to get books into the marketplace, placing your books in bookstores and libraries. Today there are many options for book distribution, including e-publishing (Kindle or Nook), and print on demand for smaller runs of books.​11Market the book using various forms of publicity, including e-mail marketing, websites, book reviews, and radio and TV publicity. Enlist the author as part of the promotional effort. Don't discount the power of an online e-mail marketing campaign--it's an inexpensive and effective way to promote.Upvote if I helped you :)