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Businesses are going mostly paperless these days, but one kind of printed material that remains in style is the classic business card. Even business cards are changing with the times, however, as several services now offer DIY card design and printing. GotPrint offers custom online business card printing and a good web-based card-designing tool, along with unique card shapes (leaf-shapes cards, anyone?). The company boasts the lowest entry price point among similar services we’ve tested, so it’s worth your consideration.
Pricing Your Business Cards
GotPrint is the least-expensive card-printing service I’ve tested, starting at just $7.63 for a 100-card job. Only PSPrint comes close, starting at $8.06 for 50 cards on glossy C1S 14-point stock. (For a good explanation of cardstock weights, read GotPrint’s explanation, Which Paper Stock is Best For You?(Opens in a new window)) If you buy 500 cards from GotPrint, your per-card cost is less than 2 cents! That compares with 4 cents for Vistaprint, 3.3 cents at PSPrint, and 3 cents at Staples. MOO oddly offers batches of 400 and 600, which cost a much higher 35 cents and 25 cents per card, respectively. If you opt for one of the sportier shapes, such as square or leaf, GotPrint’s price goes up drastically: The leaf shape starts at $27.95 for an order of 100 cards. Premium cardstock also starts at $27.95 and goes up from there.
GotPrint’s Other Services
In addition to business cards, GotPrint can print pretty much every type of paper product you can think of: greeting cards, banners, brochures, calendars, catalogs, flyers, folders, and stickers, among them. The company recently started offering pre-designed COVID-19-related signs for businesses, to help them comply with social distancing rules. Partaking in a popular shelter-in-place activity, I recently decided to order a puzzle from one of my travel photos; you can get a 550-piece puzzle for around $30, but be aware that your photo must meet stringent resolution requirements.
The company also can produce non-paper printed objects, such as DVD cases, magnets, aluminum or PVC boards, T-shirts, mouse pads, and puzzles. The company provides USPS EDDM service, or Every Door Direct Mail, letting you blanket a neighborhood without needing a mailing list. GotPrint also offers professional design services starting at $39 for up to two images (such as logos or graphics), and basic copy with up to four revisions.
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Designing Your Business Cards
The card-design interface is clear, but not quite as powerful as some competitors’ equivalent tools. It has a column of buttons across the left for adding shapes, text, images, and clip art. You can also choose from among hundreds of templates from there. The templates are organized into helpful categories like Food & Beverage, Sports & Fitness, and Real Estate. You don’t get style filters like modern or classic, though, and the designs themselves are not as stylish as those MOO offers, with some even verging on goofy. While competing services let you print square cards, as well as traditional rectangular ones and some offer rounded corners, GotPrint lets you choose circular, oval, and even leaf-shaped cards.
GotPrint’s card-design interface is more capable than MOO’s, however. You can add text and image boxes to taste and resize and move them at will. You can either type in WYSIWYG mode on the card design or in a text box to the side. The designer interface doesn’t let you snap text entries to align with existing ones or even show guide lines, as Vistaprint and Staples do, which makes designing with those products much easier. A color picker offers a good way to match colors to your images in GotPrint.
The service’s font selection is limited as well, with only 26 available, and for some boldface is not an option. Other services offer north of 40 fonts, with boldface always available. It’s also unhelpful that GotPrint’s card builder doesn’t remember your last font choice, so you could end up with a mismatch. (It defaults to the uninspiring Arial.) Undo and Redo buttons are ready at the bottom of the interface to correct your missteps.
GotPrint also doesn’t match MOO and Vistaprint in the number of cardstocks available. There are only three options: Glossy, Matte, and Trifecta—a stock with a colored middle layer. I tested one order with the basic matte one in Premium Matte Cover, and one in Premium Trifecta. The Premium Matte Cover option has a 16pt weight, the same as Moo’s Original cards, which cost $19.99 for a count of 50; with GotPrint, I paid $14.70 for double that amount.
Before you can submit the order, you have to accept a proof of your work. You can optionally view a checklist of things to check, such as the bleed line (the print edge), safety zone, and resolution. For an extra fee, you can order a manually processed PDF proof with a 24-hour turnaround.
The last step is initialing the design to approve it. My approval preview looked lower-resolution than in the design interface, and the font sizes seemed smaller that they were actually displaying. For example, my main title text was called 7 points, but it filled 2/3 of a standard business card width. This makes it hard to properly choose a font size and hard to predict how the end result will look.
You next choose a shipping method. Like its printing prices, GotPrint’s shipping costs are at the low end of pricing spectrum. For my order of 100 Standard cards, Economy (7-14 business days) cost just $3.65, compared with $4.99 for Vistaprint and $5.50 for MOO. The fastest option, Next Day AM, would have cost $21.49 for my small job. The lowest shipping rate for the Premium order was $5.16. MOO’s next-morning option costs $41.75, and Vistaprint’s fastest shipping option is $19.99 for three-business-day Express service.
Results and Print Quality
My test order of cards arrived via UPS Ground exactly one week after I place the order. The packing materials were basic compared with MOO’s box within a box and double-padded envelope shipment. In previous testing, GotPrint used outer and inner boxes, but this time the cards were shipped in a single corrugated cardboard box with a block of Styrofoam to hold them in place.
Granted, my first test was of the least-expensive business card option, but the old maxim “you get what you pay for” was strongly in evidence here. The GotPrint basic cards were on the flimsiest cardstock of any service I tested, and (perhaps because of that) the printing wasn’t as sharp and black, and the colored logo not as vivid.
The midlevel Premium cards featured sharp, clear printing and accurate colors. The cardstock is as advertised, thick with a quality feel.
The more luxurious card order arrived in double-box packaging with a flowery inner box, though as with most services, the packaging wasn’t as upscale as MOO’s. The quality of this order on very thick three-ply Trifecta cardstock was almost as good as Vistaprint’s, though Vistaprint did a better job rendering the small photo.
Cheap Card Printing
GotPrint can handle printing cheap business cards and a host of other project types. It also offers reasonably priced professional design services. GotPrint is the lowest-cost business card printing service we tested, but its cheapest card type is of inferior quality. On our test of the lowest-price entry-level business cards, the cardstock and printing quality were not as good as what other services we tested delivered, though our higher-end jobs were well executed. GotPrint’s online design tool works well; hjowever, it’s not quite as functional as Vistaprint’s, and its design templates aren’t as stylish as the far-more-expensive MOO’s. For a better online design tool and superior results, check out our Editors’ Choice, Vistaprint.
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GotPrint gets you business cards cheaper than just about anyone and has a decent design interface, but its entry level offering is of lower quality than the competition’s.
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Source link : https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/gotprint