When I was a kid, collecting trading cards was a big thing. I had trading cards for all of the major sports, some music ones, and even trading cards for TV shows like Star Trek, Welcome Back Kotter, and Happy Days. (Yeah, I’m old.) There were even U.S. Military trading cards.

Now, you’re most likely to find sports cards, but there’s also a huge line of Manga based games and stuff (Pokemon, Digimon, whatevermon.)

The cards would be a set with a similar theme and design, and the goal was to collect the set (or at least your favourite ones or the ones that would be most rare/valuable.)

You’re going to design a set of at least 8 trading cards (although have fun and keep going if you like!) Then you’re going to put them together on a sheet, print them and cut them out.

Think of how cool it would be to have actual cards for your hockey/baseball/football/volleyball team! You could make real cards for student council, Westwood teachers, the place where you work, etc!

You could design your card using any of the major Adobe apps. I preferred InDesign. The standard size for these cards is 2.5 inches by 3.5 inches.

InDesign:

Photoshop:

Samples:

IMPORTANT TIP:

Have a similar layout and ESPECIALLY a SIMILAR BACKGROUND! When you put your individual cards together on a sheet for printing & cutting, you’ll want a BLEED area that works for all of the cards. I found it easiest to NOT include a bleed in the design, but use my background as a background when I laid out the cards on one sheet.

I was able to comfortably fit 16 cards on one sheet of 11″ x 17″ card stock:

You can use my grid if you like (unless you have a better idea, which I’m open to!) and add your own Guides to help line up the actual cards. My grid: TradingCardGrid