Free business card templates, plus IDs, badges and member cards

A good business card template makes the person easy to identify and easy to contact in a few seconds. Everything else — color, texture, layout style — supports those two jobs.

Look for four things:

• Clear hierarchy. Name first, then title and company, then contact options. If your eye lands on a decoration before the name, the template is working against you.
• Strong contrast. Dark text on a light background, or white on a deep brand color. Light grey text on white looks elegant on a monitor and disappears on a phone in sunlight.
• Room for the code. A QR code needs at least 2 × 2 cm and a clear margin around it — the ISO/IEC 18004 standard specifies a quiet zone four modules wide. Templates that squeeze the code into a corner cause failed scans.
• Flexible fields. Real names and job titles vary in length. A template should handle "Li Wei" and "Alexandra Montgomery-Fitzgerald, Senior Partnerships Manager" without overflowing.

CardDeck's templates are built around these rules, so they look right before you change anything. You then adjust colors, fonts and layout in the online card designer.

Choose the template by where the card will be used. A card someone holds in a hand reads differently from one hanging on a lanyard across a room.

Digital business cards

Business card templates such as Ink Classic, Paper Minimal, Indigo Split and Soft Lilac are landscape and designed at 85 × 55 mm, the common European card size, with a matching mobile profile. Dark, minimal designs suit founders and consultants; white space lets a strong logo lead; a color block suits modern brands. Every digital business card template is available on the Free plan.

Employee ID cards

Staff Portrait, Security Dark and Department Band are portrait CR80 cards (85.6 × 54 mm) with a front and back. Portrait suits lanyards and clips. Department Band uses a color band per department so security can read it at a glance. Employee IDs are on the Team plan.

Student ID cards

Campus and Junior are landscape CR80 cards with a crest area and fields for class, section, roll number and year. Junior uses a softer palette for primary schools.

Event badges

Speaker, Attendee and Staff Pass are portrait badges sized 4 × 3 in or A6. Attendee badges use a large first name, company and a check-in QR code; Speaker and Staff Pass designs stand out across a room. See the event badge maker for role setup.

Membership cards

Member Tier and Club Light are CR80 cards with tier, member number, expiry date and a QR code or barcode. Club Light carries a barcode for front-desk scanners.

There is no single worldwide size. The most common are 85 × 55 mm in much of Europe, 3.5 × 2 in (88.9 × 50.8 mm) in the US and Canada, and the CR80 card size of 85.6 × 54 mm — the size of a bank card, defined as ID-1 in ISO/IEC 7810 — used for ID cards and membership cards.

For a digital business card, size only matters when you print. The digital card itself is a responsive page that adapts to any phone screen. If you do print, match the size to your printer's stock and keep important text at least 3 mm inside the trim edge.

You customize a template in the designer in five steps.

1. Pick the template closest to the look you want.
2. Apply your brand. Upload your logo (SVG keeps it sharp at any size) and set brand colors and fonts. They are saved to your workspace and reused across templates.
3. Set the fields. Show, hide or reorder fields, and add call-to-action buttons such as "Book a call".
4. Place the QR code on the front or back, and choose a static or dynamic code. For printed cards, dynamic is almost always the right choice.
5. Preview and publish. Check the live mobile preview and the print layout, then publish.

You can change the template later without changing your card's link or QR code.

On Team and Business plans, an admin locks a template so the logo, colors, fonts and layout can't be changed, and opens only the fields members should edit — usually name, title, phone and photo. Every card on that template stays on brand, whoever creates it.

When the brand changes, the admin edits the template once and every card using it updates. Combined with the batch generator, this lets you issue cards to a whole department from a spreadsheet in one job.

Most template problems come from decoration crowding out information. Avoid these:

• Too many fields. Pick the five or six details people need; link to the rest.
• Low-contrast text on photos or gradients.
• A QR code smaller than 2 cm, or one with no margin around it.
• Inverted QR codes (light modules on a dark background). Many phones read them, but some scanners don't. Dark on light is safer.
• Thin fonts at small sizes, which break up in print.
• Text close to the trim edge on printed cards, which can be cut off.

For ID-specific advice — required fields, photo rules and front and back layouts — see our ID card templates.