Business card

[juanfordroad]

A World War II friend of mine has asked me to design a card.  All I have is AE CS4 and the fonts don't look good that small.  Neither does the photo of the medal.

Is there any way to improve the quality, without spending tons of money?

Thank you.

[Mylenium]

AE is not a print design tool! Print requires higher DPI and in the AE world even something as mundane as a business card would equate a HD 720 comp. You really need to work with tools that are actualyl meant for this stuff. If you don't want to spend any money, you can always use Inkscape, Scribus and GIMP, but of course you'd have to learn how the work to produce a print-ready file.

Mylenium

[juanfordroad]

Thanks very much for your input.  I have downloaded a copy of Gimp.  Looks like a pretty steep learning curve.  Do you think it will improve the fonts and photo?

[Mylenium]

You may want to educate yourself on soem print basics. Typically work with 300 DPI or more, which for an 11 cm x 6 cm business card as the most common format here in Germany translates to 1330 x 710 pixels. whether that is good enough is entirely up to you, the requirements of the clients and the reproduction method used. There's really no simple answers here. I would suggest you spend some time scouring the Illustrator and Photoshop help. They have soem info on a few of the basics plus of course you can spend any number of hours on Wikipedia and other knowledge sources.

Mylenium

[juanfordroad]

Thanks again.

Good advice for a novice like me.

Stay safe.  Hope conditions there improve quickly.