Wood Business Cards: A Practical Design Guide

Why wood cards work

A wood business card gets kept. It's heavier than paper, it smells faintly like a workshop, and it survives a wallet. But wood is not paper — the same file that prints crisp on card stock can come off the laser blurry, patchy, or unreadable. The wins come from a few decisions made before you export.

1. Pick the right wood

Grain and density decide how sharp your engraving looks.

• Cherry & alder — tight grain, high contrast burn. Our default for detailed logos and small type.
• Maple — pale, very tight grain, near-photographic detail. Great for illustrations.
• Walnut — dark base, lower contrast. Beautiful for bold marks, harder for fine text.
• Bamboo — striped grain fights small type. Skip it if your logo has thin serifs.

2. Font size and weight

On wood, anything below ~6pt starts to lose its counters (the enclosed shapes inside letters like a, e, o). Our tested minimums:

• Body text: 7pt minimum in a sans-serif with a medium weight.
• Serifs: 9pt minimum — thin strokes burn away first.
• All-caps labels: 6pt works if the strokes are ≥ 0.5pt.
• Line weight: 0.3pt or thicker. Hairlines vanish.

3. Contrast is a design choice, not an accident

Laser engraving on wood is essentially controlled scorching. Higher power and slower speed = darker burn and more contrast, but also more char and lost detail. We tune per-file, but the principle for designers: fewer, bolder shapes read better than many thin ones. If your logo has a gradient or a soft shadow, plan for it to become a solid fill.

4. Vector vs. raster art

Both work, but for different jobs.

• Vector (SVG, AI, PDF) — best for logos, icons, and text. Scales cleanly and engraves as sharp outlines or filled shapes. This is what you want 90% of the time.
• Raster (PNG, JPG) — needed for photos or complex illustrations. Export at 300 DPI at final size, in grayscale. Bump contrast before you send — the laser reads brightness, not color.

5. File prep checklist

Before you send us your artwork:

• Card size is 3.5" × 2.0" (standard) or your custom spec.
• Convert all text to outlines / paths — no font substitution surprises.
• Merge overlapping shapes; delete hidden layers.
• Keep engraving art at least 0.1" (2.5mm) from the card edge.
• Send one file per side (front / back).

6. Common mistakes we fix

• QR codes under 0.75" — modules blur, phones can't read them.
• Ultra-light "hairline" script fonts — pretty on screen, invisible on cherry.
• Full-bleed dark fills — heavy char, warped cards. We suggest a border instead.
• Low-res PNG logos scaled up. Send the vector if you have it.