SOFTWARE MASTERCLASS
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH SERIF AFFINITY PUBLISHER
If you are selling images, having a business card is much more professional. It’s easy with Affinity Publisher, as Rod Lawton shows in a new series
Sooner or later, anyone who is serious about pursuing photography as a profession will need a business card. It doesn’t matter whether you are a commercial photographer, an event photographer or a fine art photographer building a portfolio – a business card will spread the word, get your name about and show people that you are a serious pro.
Creating a stylish and effective business card is quite simple, and you don’t have to be a professional designer. Our sample business card is plain and straightforward and gives potential contacts and clients all the information that they need.
Perfect tool Affinity Publisher is the perfect tool for any kind of publishing work associated with your photography, especially if you’re already familiar with Affinity Photo, because the interface and tools will be familiar and they are designed to work alongside each other.
There are simpler business card design tools including some you can use online, but the advantage of Publisher is that it does so much more – and in the rest of this Publisher series of tutorials we’ll show you how to create a letterhead, web banner, flyer, leaflet and even an ebook, all using the same building blocks of a standardised logo, font choice and colour scheme.
This time, we’ll start from the basics, with a brand new document. In photography you would start with an image, but in publishing you start from the document you want to create. This will include both the dimensions of the printed document and its print resolution.
Incidentally, in photo editing you might be used to working in pixels, but in publishing and design it’s normal to work in ‘point’ sizes.
Once you have got used to Affinity Publisher’s tools you can add your own stylistic flourishes to the card to produce something really eye-catching. Our business card is a simple project in design terms but it introduces some key points in the Affinity Publisher workflow and for desktop publishing in general. It’s just the start, though, because this series will build on this to demonstrate more advanced publications you can create easily using the same basic building blocks, one step at a time. For more, see bit.ly/serifpubap
Top tip
This is an important point with Affinity Publisher – you can either embed graphics like our logo directly into the document or you can store them separately and link to them. If you use the File>Document Setup command you can check how your document
