Card, banner and website sizes, side by side
Vishra, Vishful Studio. . About 3 minutes to read.
The three things I make to order are a 2 by 6 foot party banner, a 5 by 7 inch invitation and an event website. Written as a list the sizes never look as different as they are, so here they are drawn next to each other at the same scale.
Why the card looks so small
The banner is 24 by 72 inches. The card is 5 by 7. That makes the banner more than three times as tall and over fourteen times as wide, and its face has room for about 49 cards. Nothing in the drawing is shrunk to make the point. The Same height button redraws all three at one height, which is useful for comparing shapes, but it is no longer to scale.
The gap makes sense once you think about where each one is seen. A card is read in your hand. A banner hangs on a wall and is seen from across the room, often behind everyone in the photos.
The party banner
Mine are 2 by 6 feet, which is 24 by 72 inches, set landscape. I design a banner as a backdrop for the photos you will keep, with your wording and the colours of your occasion.
Because a banner is viewed from further away, it is usually printed at 150 ppi, sometimes 100 ppi, rather than the 300 ppi used for cards. Even so, the long side at 150 ppi is 10800 pixels, and very large pixel sizes may be refused or slow in Canva. A common fix is to design at half size and have the printer scale it up 200 percent. Bleed and safe margins for a banner are set by the print shop, especially when it gets hems or grommets, so ask them before you set up the file.
The invitation
A 5 by 7 inch card, the same size as the holiday card in my shop. It is ready to print, post or send as an image. At 300 ppi the trim is 1500 by 2100 pixels, and with 0.125 inch of bleed on every side the page becomes 5.25 by 7.25 inches. The guide to 5 by 7 trim, bleed and the safe zone has every number and the Canva setup.
The event website
An event website is a link rather than a sheet of paper, so it has no print size. Guests open it on their phones, and the phone is what I design it for. The one in the drawing is there for comparison; real screens vary a little. The website holds the date and the place on one page, and it can count down the days and take RSVPs.
If you are printing cards as well, a QR code on the card can open the website.
Working out your own numbers
For any other card or banner, the print size calculator gives trim, bleed and safe sizes in inches, millimetres and pixels, drawn to scale.