Choosing colours for a business card
Two-colour or full-colour: decide before you pick
A business card is a tiny, fixed canvas with a long life: it gets handed over, pocketed and read at arm's length, often under poor light. That makes the number of colours a practical choice, not only a style one. A two-colour card typically means one ink for text, often a dark neutral, and one brand accent for a logo, rule or job title. A full-colour card is built from the four process inks, which allows photographs, gradients and large flooded backgrounds. Which is cheaper depends on the printer and the process, so ask for quotes on both before you commit.
Constraint tends to help. When you only have a neutral and an accent, you are forced to decide which one carries the text and which one carries the identity. The Duo pairs navigator on this page is built for that decision: each result is an ink and a surface that you can use either way round. If your brand already has a colour, start from it in the brand tool or the OKLCH picker, then look for a partner colour rather than starting from scratch.
Face, reverse and knockout text
The face of a card is normally dark text on a light surface. A reverse is the opposite: light text knocked out of, or printed over, a dark or saturated block. Many cards use both, for example a dark back with a white logo and a white front with dark details. Contrast is not symmetrical between the two. WCAG 2.x ratios are the same whichever colour is the text, but people tend to find light-on-dark type thinner and harder to read at small sizes, and the APCA model reflects that by giving the two polarities different signs and magnitudes. In the table below, face rows have a positive Lc and reverse rows a negative one, even where the WCAG ratios are similar.
Print adds its own effects. Ink spreads slightly as it soaks into paper, which is often called dot gain or ink gain. Dark ink spreading into small light counters, such as the inside of an e or a, can close them up, and fine strokes of a light colour knocked out of a dark block can be eaten away. That is why printers commonly recommend a sturdier weight and a bit more size for reversed text. If a reverse is built from several CMYK inks, slight misregistration can also leave a fuzzy halo, so ask your printer how they handle small reversed type.
Why 7–9 pt type needs more contrast than body text
The usual contrast thresholds assume text at a normal reading size. WCAG 2.x asks for at least 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text, which it defines as 18 pt, or 14 pt bold, and above. Names on a card are often set larger than that, but the phone number, address and web address are routinely 7–9 pt, which is well below the size the thresholds were framed around. Small strokes are thin, so there is less ink to separate from the paper and any loss from lighting or ink gain hurts more. Treat 4.5:1 as the practical floor for that small print and give yourself headroom wherever the design allows it.
Be realistic about what the number means. WCAG is written for screens, and there is no print equivalent that this site can quote. A card is lit by an office lamp, daylight or a dim restaurant; the paper may be coated or uncoated; and ink on uncoated stock looks softer and darker or flatter than the same value on a monitor. So the on-screen ratio is a useful guide for ruling out weak pairs, not a guarantee of how the finished card reads. The contrast checker shows the WCAG ratio and the APCA Lc together, and the contrast pair library lists ready-checked combinations. For a closer look at how the two models differ, read WCAG vs APCA.
HEX, CMYK and spot colours: proof with your printer
The HEX codes on this site are sRGB values, the colour space of the web and most screens. Printing works differently. Process printing mixes cyan, magenta, yellow and black, and a spot colour is a pre-mixed ink identified by a number, most famously in the Pantone system. Converting an sRGB colour to CMYK depends on the printer's press, paper and colour profile, and some very saturated screen colours, such as vivid oranges, greens and electric blues, usually fall outside what CMYK can reproduce, so they print duller than they look on screen. Spot inks can reach colours process inks cannot, but each one adds cost.
The safe workflow is to pick your pair here, send the HEX values to the printer, and ask for a proof on the actual stock before the full run. Check the smallest text and the reverse areas in particular. If the proof looks weaker than the screen did, darken the accent in OKLCH lightness rather than adding chroma: the gamut mapping guide explains why very saturated colours behave unpredictably across devices.
Choosing a brand accent and a neutral
A dependable structure is one neutral for text and one accent for emphasis. For the neutral, a very dark grey or navy is usually kinder than pure black, and it leaves black for the cases where you want the maximum. For the accent, choose a colour you can also use as a surface, so the card can flip between a light front and a dark or coloured back. Mid-lightness accents are the hard case: they are too light to carry white text and too dark to carry black, which is why the orange row below needs a darker fill. If you are unsure which hue says what, the colour meaning guide and the hue hubs for blue, green and orange are good places to browse real values; the colour library covers the rest.
Once you have a pair, check it both ways round, look at the smallest line of text, and export the HEX. If the card is part of a bigger identity, Brand sets and Studio extend the same colours into a fuller system, and the sibling pages for SaaS landing pages and presentations cover the same colours on screen.