Why it still works
A card does three jobs no app has displaced. It works instantly with no pairing, platform or battery. It carries a physical impression: within seconds of the handshake, the recipient has felt your stock weight and finish, which is information about how you run your business. And it persists; it sits in a pocket and resurfaces later, which is the moment it was printed for. That is also the honest scope: a card is a networking object, not a marketing campaign, and it pays for itself the first time it lands the second conversation.
The sizes, with the fabrication trap corrected
The standard Australian business card is 90 x 55mm. That figure is a trade convention, stated consistently across Australian printers' own product pages; no standards body defines it. The plausible-sounding claim you will find on content-mill sites, that business cards follow "the ISO standard", is a conflation: ISO/IEC 7810 defines the ID-1 format, 85.60 x 53.98mm, the size of payment and identity cards worldwide, and it genuinely applies to premium plastic/PVC business cards, which are made on the same card blanks and dies as ID cards. So a paper card and a plastic card from the same brand are, correctly, different sizes. Personal stationery rounds out the format family via the A-series of ISO 216: A6 cards and DL envelopes for invitations and announcements, which is where the premium wedding-stationery work this page also covers actually lives.
| Object | Size | Governed by |
|---|---|---|
| Australian paper business card | 90 x 55 mm | Trade convention (printers' own specs) |
| Plastic/PVC card (and every bank card) | 85.60 x 53.98 mm | ISO/IEC 7810 ID-1 |
| A6 invitation card | 105 x 148 mm | ISO 216 A-series |
| DL envelope contents (A4 folded in thirds) | 99 x 210 mm | ISO 216-derived convention |
Stock and finish: where the budget should go
The card is the one product where stock upgrade cost is trivial in absolute terms and maximal in effect; moving from a light board to a genuinely heavy one costs cents per card and changes the object completely. The finish menu is the same one covered in our finishes guide, miniaturised: matt laminate with spot UV for gloss contrast, foil for a mark that catches light, letterpress impression into cotton stock for the full craft object (alive and billable). The same discipline applies at card scale: one finish, chosen for a reason. And because cards are trimmed from larger sheets, the bleed and safe-zone rules bite harder at 90 x 55mm than anywhere else; a border design with no bleed allowance is the classic first-card mistake.
The QR code question
A QR code earns its corner when it does one job: opening your contact details, portfolio or booking page directly, saving the re-typing that most exchanged cards die of. It wastes the corner when it duplicates the URL already printed beside it or points at a generic homepage. Print it dark on light with quiet space around it, and test it from a real phone at arm's length before approving the proof; scannability at card size depends on module density, so shorter URLs make more robust codes. NFC business cards exist as a product category, but they are electronics purchases rather than print jobs, and outside this page's scope.
Ordering without regret
- Proof the actual name spellings and numbers twice; a typo on 500 cards is the trade's oldest sad story.
- Order per person in modest quantities; roles and numbers change faster than cards run out.
- Ask for the printer's card-specific template; their trim and safe-zone allowances are the contract (why).
- If the brand colour is critical, say so at order time: gang-run card products trade colour control for price (the economics).