Here are a few other crucial business card guidelines to help you better understand what makes a good business card:

• Design your card with your audience in mind. If your target audience is designers, you would create a different type of card than if you're targeting bankers. 
• Include only the most important information. Resist the temptation to overcrowd your card with tons of information, just include enough to make the card memorable and pique the recipient’s interest.
• Make sure the text is legible. The point of your basic business card is to communicate, so if the text is too small, distorted or excessively stylised, no one will be able to read it.
• Honour negative space. Resist the temptation to fill every conceivable millimetre of your card with either text or graphics. Here the old adage ‘Less is more’ applies. Including some negative space gives the eye somewhere to rest and makes the information you do include stand out.

1. Study the Best Business Cards from Across a Variety of Industries

One of the best ways to create business cards is to study effective business cards from a variety of industries, including your own. Try to collect as many as you can and lay them out on a flat surface. Make a note of what you like and don’t like about each card, what you find memorable and what you think just doesn’t work. 

You may want to emulate some of the qualities you’ve identified, find successful or that are memorable in the cards you’ve studied. Just remember though that you don’t want to emulate your competition too much because you want to retain some qualities that'll differentiate your business. 

2. Create Business Cards Consistent With Other Brand Materials

Before you start designing a business card you should have decided on your brand logo, typography and colour scheme. These are the foundation of your brand identity. They should play a big part in the style and layout of your card and should be consistent across your website and other promotional materials.

3. Use Basic Design Principles

As printed materials, the basic principles of paper-based design apply to a good business card design. You need to keep all your key copy at least 5mm from the trim edge of your card, maintain a minimum size for your text to remain legible, design in CMYK and work at 300dpi to achieve the best quality reproduction. 

4. Choose the Best Shape and Size Card for Your Needs

Business cards are traditionally horizontal rectangular cards, but that doesn’t mean that yours has to be. Depending on your industry, the brand image you want to project and the audience you’re communicating with, your card can take on a number of other shapes from organic to geometrical. Really you want to consider what shape and size card best represents your brand. Even if you don’t want to step too far out of the box, consider a vertical rectangular card. They're less common than horizontals and can differentiate you from the competition. 

5. Keep Your Design Simple

 There’s a belief among design novices that simple equals boring, but this is far from the case. Minimal designs can be quite elegant, and best of all, creating breathing room on your card allows important information to stand out and catch the eye.