Business card sizes in the UAE, and why printers disagree
Three different dimensions are all described as the UAE standard, by printers who should know. Here is where the disagreement comes from, which size to pick, and the artwork specification that will not come back rejected.
Ask three printing companies in Dubai for the standard business card size and you can get three answers: 85 × 55 mm, 90 × 50 mm, or 90 × 54 mm. All three are described as standard, by companies that print thousands of cards a week. That is not sloppiness — it is a genuine split, and knowing which side your printer is on before you send artwork saves a reprint.
Where the three sizes come from
They are inherited from different places, and all three arrived in the UAE market at once.
- 85 × 55 mm is the European convention, and it is almost exactly the size of a credit card (85.6 × 53.98 mm). It fits every wallet slot in existence, which is the entire argument for it.
- 90 × 50 mm is the size most commonly quoted by UAE and wider GCC printers. It is slightly longer and slightly shorter than the European card — a touch more room for an Arabic and English line side by side.
- 90 × 54 mm sits between the two and tends to turn up where a printer has standardised on a particular press or guillotine setup.
The practical consequence is small but real: artwork built for 90 × 50 and printed at 85 × 55 loses 5 mm of width and gains 5 mm of height. Anything close to the edge gets trimmed, and a logo that was centred no longer is.
Which one to choose
If you have no other constraint, 90 × 50 mm is the safer default in the UAE simply because more local printers treat it as their house size, which means fewer conversations and fewer surprises. Choose 85 × 55 mm if your cards will be handed to people outside the region often, or if wallet fit genuinely matters to you — it is the only one of the three that reliably slots into a card holder designed abroad.
What matters far more than the choice is that the choice is made once and written down. A brand that prints 90 × 50 this year and 85 × 55 next year has two generations of card in circulation that do not stack, and that is the sort of small inconsistency people notice without being able to say why.
The specification to send
Most rejected artwork fails on the same four things. Get these right and the file goes straight through.
| Setting | What to use | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Bleed | 3 mm on all four sides | Guillotines drift by a fraction of a millimetre. Bleed means a drift shows more background, not a white sliver. |
| Safe margin | 3–5 mm inside the trim | Nothing you care about — text, logo, a signature — should sit outside this. |
| Colour mode | CMYK | Screens are RGB, presses are CMYK. Convert yourself or the printer converts for you, and you will not like the greens. |
| Resolution | 300 DPI | Below this, edges go soft at card size. Logos should be vector rather than a raster image at any DPI. |
So a 90 × 50 mm card is supplied as a 96 × 56 mm document with the trim at 90 × 50 and everything important kept inside roughly 84 × 44 mm. Export as a print-ready PDF unless your printer has asked for something else.
Stock and finish, briefly
Standard cards are usually printed on 300, 350 or 400 gsm board. The jump from 300 to 350 is the one most people can feel in the hand, and it is usually inexpensive. Beyond 400 gsm you are into speciality territory where the card becomes a statement in itself.
- Matt lamination — soft to the touch, kills glare, and the most forgiving of fingerprints.
- Gloss lamination — makes colour and photography pop, shows every fingerprint.
- Soft-touch — the velvety finish; expensive, and genuinely memorable when the rest of the card earns it.
- Spot UV or foil — a raised or metallic detail on one element. Effective precisely because it is used on one element.
The thing worth getting right before any of this
A perfectly specified card still fails if it does not look like the business it belongs to. The most common version of this: a card designed by the printer, a website built by somebody else, and an Instagram grid run by a third party — three different typefaces, three different versions of the logo, three slightly different blues.
The card is often the first physical thing anyone holds from your company, and it gets compared — consciously or not — against the website they look up afterwards. Those two should be recognisably the same business.
We design and print from the same brand files, so the card in someone's hand matches the site they visit next.