Photoshop design templates are very popular with artists and designers because they save a lot of time when working on a project for a client. There are many online marketplaces that sell these templates, including Creative Market and Adobe Stock.

Each template designer has his/her own preferences for designing templates. In this example, I am using one of my own business card templates, which contains a separate artboard for the front and back of a business card. Each design element is on an individual layer, making it very easy to customize the placeholder graphics and text for your needs. The layers are organized and color coded. Let's open the template and take a look.

You will see three artboards (see screenshot). The first artboard (see screenshot) contains the instructions for the guidelines and a list of the fonts used in the design. The Eye icon for each layer in the Instructions artboard is color coded blue. You will want to use the Bleed, Trim and Safe guidelines when placing your design elements.

Bleed Line

The background graphics for the card front and card back should extend to the red Bleed line and therefore over the entire artboard. By extending the background to the Bleed line, you prevent a white border along the edge of the card.

Trim and Safe Lines

If your text, logo and graphics are inside the blue Trim line, they should not be cut away. But it is better to place your design elements inside the green Safe line.

Layers Panel

Besides the Instructions artboard, the Layers panel also has artboards for the Business Card Front (see screenshot) and Business Card Back (see screenshot). Within each artboard, you should see several layers containing the design elements, including layers for text, shapes and graphics. The text layers are color coded red and the shapes and graphics layers are color coded green.

You will also have a layer containing the Bleed, Trim and Safe guidelines for each artboard. As this layer is the only layer in these artboards that is color coded blue, its easy to toggle on and off the visibility of the guidelines, by clicking the Eye icon.

Background Graphics

As in many design templates, I have included coordinating background designs (see screenshot) for the card front and card back. These graphics are meant to be used as is. However, they are also smart objects and easy to replace with your own graphics. These background graphic layers are color coded green.

Placeholder Logo

If you prefer to include a logo graphic, there is a placeholder logo graphic that is a smart object. Double-click the smart object (see screenshot) to replace the placeholder logo graphic with your own. Once you have replaced the logo and saved the temporary .psb file, you can resize and reposition the logo as needed on the artboard.

Placeholder Text

You will want to replace the placeholder text with your name or your business name (see screenshot). You also have placeholder text for your profession, email, website, social hashtag and phone number. For all of these, you can change the text, font, color, style, size, position or delete the text as needed.

The template uses free Adobe Typekit fonts. If you have a Creative Cloud membership or a free trial membership, you can easily download or synch the free fonts from within Photoshop (see screenshot). All text layers are color coded red.

As each line of text is on a separate layer, it is very easy to customize the text with your own information. Just select the placeholder text (see screenshot) and type your own text.

Bullet Icons

On the card front or back, some lines of text have a small vector shape icon to the left of the text. You have the option to change the size, fill color, reposition or delete these icons. Just double-click the thumbnail to open the Color Picker (see screenshot) and choose a color. Go to the Properties panel (see screenshot) to change the other properties. As with the other graphic layers, these layers are color coded green.

As you can see, by using smart objects for changeable graphics, vector shapes and editable text, these design layout templates are easy to customize with your clients information, logo and brand colors.

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