In this article, you will see some best practices that you may find useful while creating an editable template:
- Locking email domain
- Longer text fields (eg. names and job titles)
- Double-language templates
- Chinese characters
- Special characters
- Images
- Phone numbers
- Office addresses
Locking email domain
1. My company is using different email domains
If your company is using different email domains (e.g. @gelato.no, @gelato.com, @gelato.se), we do recommend leaving the email address field fully editable.
Note: As an alternative, you can also create as many templates as the number of domains and leave the domain field uneditable.
2. My company is using only one email domain
If there is only one domain used (e.g. @gelato.com), we recommend to lock the email domain part and anchor the text fields.
Longer text fields (e.g. names and job titles)
If your editable template includes text fields that need to accommodate longer text, such as e.g. the employee's name or job title, we recommend creating longer fields or allowing the field to resize vertically.
Note: Please ensure that the text fields never go past the bleed line, especially if you are using a vertical business card template.
Double-language templates
If you would like to have a double-language template used for instance for Latin and Cyrillic characters, you need to remember to choose an appropriate font that supports both languages or simply create one language version on the front of the cards and the second language version on the backside (we recommend this option for aesthetic reasons as well).
Chinese characters
For Chinese fonts, we do not recommend using them with the English fonts on the same line as this may cause RIP & glyph issues when printing.
Special characters
For templates that include special characters (such as Chinese, Arabic, Cyrillic), we recommend using 'Open Type Fonts' without any license restrictions and compatible with all non-Latin languages.
Images
For any image/logo you would like to place on the editable template, we do not recommend using JPEG nor PNG files as these formats may not produce an optimal print result. After placing the image/shape remember to lock them so that they cannot be changed later on.
Phone numbers
If your template contains several fields for phone numbers but not each employee has all of them, we recommend leaving the mobile/phone number field fully editable. In this case, you will need to create only one template and then leave the users the option of updating the numbers accordingly.
If the telephone numbers are defined, we recommend leaving the number name field fixed. In this case, you will need to create one template for each combination of telephone numbers the employees may have (e.g. when there is only mobile phone available or a template with having both options mobile and landline).
Office addresses
Typically business cards include office addresses. There are 2 alternatives we recommend:
1. You can have the office address field locked. In this case, you will need to create one template for each office location. While this solution can reduce the chances for errors, it will also cause an increase in the number of template you will need to create.
2. You can leave the office address field unlocked and editable. In this case, you will need to create only one template and leave to the users ordering the card the option to update the information.
