Step one: a brief that decides things
A useful brief is not a long one. It is one that closes decisions. Which formats, which scheme, whether the card is numberless, what mandatory text must appear, which fonts you have the right to use, and who signs off. Those six answers determine most of the design space.
The parts that are genuinely creative, the direction, the references, the things to avoid, matter too, but they are much easier to work with once the constraints are fixed. A brief that is rich in mood and silent on formats produces concepts that have to be redone.
Never send live card numbers, CVVs, PINs or real cardholder data in a brief. Placeholder values are all a designer needs, and real data has no business leaving your systems.
Step two: concepts
Concepts are distinct directions, not variations on one idea. The point is to make the choice a real one: several defensible answers to the same brief, each internally coherent, so that choosing between them is a decision about direction rather than about details.
This is the stage where the constraints from the brief earn their place. A concept presented on the correct proportions, with the chip where the chip goes and the scheme mark at a plausible size, is a concept that can actually be built. One presented as a free-floating rectangle is a mood board.
It is also the cheapest moment to change your mind. Redirecting at concept stage costs a round; redirecting after approval costs the project.
Step three: revisions, with a defined scope
Revision rounds refine the chosen direction. They are for resolving type, spacing, colour, hierarchy and the back of the card, not for reopening the direction, which is a different piece of work and is priced as such.
One thing helps more than anything else here: send one collated set of comments per round, agreed internally before it reaches us. It moves a project faster than a stream of individual opinions arriving over three days, and it avoids the most common cause of a wasted round, which is two stakeholders asking for opposite things.
- Collect feedback before sending it
- One voice per round. Resolve internal disagreements first.
- Be specific about the problem, not the fix
- "The tier name competes with the logo" is more useful than "make the tier name smaller".
- Include the people who can say no
- A stakeholder who first sees the work at approval will have opinions at approval.
- Check compliance text early
- Legal wording tends to arrive late and longer than expected.
Step four: approval and final files
Approval is a specific moment: the design is agreed and the files are prepared for production. What you should receive is layered, editable vector artwork in the formats a producer works from, with fonts handled correctly and colours specified, not a flattened image.
This is worth being firm about, with one caveat. Vector is what most card production needs, and a studio that will not hand over vector source makes your next change dependent on them. But virtual print on cards, and any design built on photography or fine gradients, needs high-resolution raster artwork at the size and resolution your producer specifies. The right answer is layered source plus whatever raster your production method needs, and the producer tells you which.
Step five: handing over to a manufacturer
The design and the manufacture are separate jobs. Your manufacturer works from their own technical template, and adapting an approved design to that template is a distinct task with its own requirements. Some issuers handle it internally; some ask us to quote for it as separate work.
The manufacturer is also the authority on what their process can reproduce. If they come back saying a finish will not hold at that line weight, they are right, and the design adjusts. We stay available to answer those questions directly, so the answer comes from whoever drew the card rather than being relayed second hand. Building that exchange into the schedule, rather than treating it as a surprise, is what keeps a launch date intact.
We design the card and, if you want, source the finished cards through our own network of producers, sampling included. We do not run a production line or issue cards ourselves.
Who needs to be in the room
A card design touches more parts of an organisation than its size suggests. Marketing owns the brand, product owns the customer experience, compliance owns the mandatory text, and someone in operations owns the relationship with the manufacturer. Each of them can block a launch.
The failure pattern is consistent: the design is developed with one stakeholder, approved informally, and then shown to the others at the end, at which point compliance supplies wording that does not fit, or an executive who was never consulted dislikes the direction. Neither objection is unreasonable. Both are far cheaper at concept stage.
The fix is simply to name the approver at the start, and to make sure everyone whose objection could stop the project has seen the direction before refinement begins.
- One named approver
- The person whose yes is final. Not a committee.
- Compliance input, early
- Mandatory wording shapes the layout, so it is an input rather than a final check.
- Whoever owns the manufacturer relationship
- They know what your supplier can actually produce. If you have not chosen one, we can source the cards for you instead.
- The app team, if there is a virtual card
- They will implement the card art and know how it renders.
What you should receive at the end
The deliverable is not a picture of a card. It is the set of files from which a card can be produced and from which future variants can be built, and it should be usable by someone who is not the original designer.
In practice this means layered vector artwork with type handled correctly, colours specified rather than approximated, and each format supplied separately, because the virtual card, the plastic card and the metal card are different files with different requirements even when they share one design.
- Layered, editable vector source
- Not a flattened export. Your next change depends on this.
- Each format as its own file
- Virtual, plastic and metal have different requirements and different artwork.
- Front and back, both resolved
- The back is part of the design, not an afterthought.
- Colour specified
- So the manufacturer is matching a defined value rather than guessing from a screen.
- Fonts handled correctly
- Either supplied under your licence or converted, with the decision documented.
Where the time actually goes
Across projects, the delays cluster in the same few places, and none of them are the drawing.
- Undecided formats
- Deciding mid-project that a metal tier is needed after all.
- Font licensing
- Discovering at final-file stage that nobody holds a licence for the brand typeface.
- Mandatory wording
- Waiting on legal or on an issuing partner for text that has to appear.
- Late stakeholders
- A decision-maker introduced after the direction was already chosen.
- Scheme requirements
- Confirming which mark variant the programme may use, which is your scheme contact's answer to give.