Create Your Own Business Card With Publisher

Your business card is an essential and necessary marketing tool.  A good business card not only projects the right image about you and your company to potential clients; it's a convenient way to offer your customers your contact information.  You can create a terrific and professional looking business card using Publisher.

Open Publisher. From Publication Types menu, click and select Business Cards. A variety of pre-designed templates will appear under the Business Cards category.  They are further categorized by Newer and Classic designs; you can scroll to check out all the templates or just click on the links to see the newer or the classic designs. If you are a novice then I suggest staying away from using the Blank category. Unless you are a design guru and know the perfect design you want for your business card, it's always a good idea to begin with a pre-existing template. The templates provided in Publisher are created by professionals so you have access to some great designs to begin with.

Click and choose a template that you like. You will see a thumbnail preview of the selected template on the right of the screen. If you like the design then just click on Create and Publisher will open the template.

Now you can use the options from the Format Publication menu to change the Color Schemes and the Font Schemes to customize your business card. If at this point you do not like the selected template, you can even change the template from the Format Publication menu.

Click on the text placeholder and replace all the existing text on the template with your own information. Similarly, you can replace the existing logo with your own company logo. The most important thing to remember when creating your business card is to make sure you include the following information:

• Your name and title
• Your company logo
• Your address, phone and fax numbers
• Your email address
• Your Website address

You can also create a double-sided business card. Instead of leaving the back of your business card blank, you can use the space to add your company motto, a list of products, or driving directions. You can also duplicate all the information from the front of your business card and include it in the back in another language.

Here's how: First finish creating side one of your business card. Then from the Insert menu, click Page. From the Insert Page dialog box, make sure that the radio buttons After current page and Insert blank pages are selected. Click OK. Now all you have to do is add all the information from the front of the card to this new page in your desired language. Or you can add any other information you may wish to the back of your business card.

And, last, but not least, do circulate that well-crafted business card that you have created. It's useless just sitting in your desk drawer!                                                                                                                

- Rina B.