Pages tutorial: Create your own professional business cards

Macs might well be traditionally associated with unrivalled creativity, but they’re also incredibly useful for business. Whether that’s creating invoices in Numbers or chatting to clients halfway across the globe via FaceTime, they have plenty of uses. With that in mind, why not use Apple’s Pages to create some eye-catching business cards? Pages might be fairly inexpensive on the Mac App Store (£13.99/$19.99), but don’t let that fool you, it’s actually more than capable of producing some highly professional results. Once you’ve created your design, you could either print your finished business cards off yourself using your own printer and some good quality card, or you could upload it to a number of inexpensive printing websites and let them do the hard work for you. Either way, the result will be a professional-looking business card that doesn’t cost you the earth. Here’s a great little guide to designing and printing one.

Step 1: Choose a template

Fire up Pages and, from the Template Chooser, select Business Cards and a design. It doesn’t matter which design, as we’ll be starting afresh anyway.

Step 2: Select and delete

When the template opens, you’ll see the same design repeated ten times. Select the content in each repeated section and hit Backspace to delete.

Step 3: Start with a shape

First, we’ll create a logo. Head into the Shapes menu and choose a circle. Drag this into your design so it fills up just under half of a section.

Step 4: Lose the stroke

By default, new shapes have an outline, or stroke, around them. To remove this, bring up the Inspector window and, under Graphic, set the stroke to none.

Step 5: See right through it

With your circle shape selected, head into the Opacity menu and select around 50-60%. This should make your circle slightly translucent.

Step 6: Rinse and repeat

Copy and paste your circle, offsetting it slightly against the original, and change its colour to something lighter. The effect completes your logo.

Step 7: All the details

Add some contact details, such as your name, job title, company and address. Try to keep things simple and clear of visual clutter, though.

Step 8: Repeat it

When you’re happy with your design, copy everything you’ve done and paste it into the other spaces in your template to create ten business cards.

Step 9: Print it out

If you’re printing your cards at home, be sure to use high-quality thick card (preferably matte not glossy) and select the highest print settings possible.

Click on the image below to zoom in and view the annotations