English/Chinese Business Cards in NYC?

April 11, 2007 8:20 AM

Where in NYC to get bilingual English/Chinese business cards printed up?

I'm looking to get a set of business/calling cards printed with English on one side and Chinese on the other. This is pretty common in China, but I imagine that my local printer might have trouble with the typesetting, etc. if they're not familiar with Chinese. I don't need it translated, I can supply the text myself. The Morningside area would be ideal, but maybe I'd have a better chance with a printer in Chinatown? Any tips would be helpful.

posted by sudasana to Shopping (4 answers total)

Is designing the cards youself an option? Most places will take a Postscript file, which is font-agnostic.
posted by mkultra at 8:34 AM on April 11, 2007

mkultra's advice assumes you "convert text to outlines" before you hand over the postscript file. If you do that, your only concern will be making sure the printer gets the Chinese side oriented (heh) correctly relative to the English side. But yeah—any print shop should be able to deal with that. So you just need someone who can produce the art for the card in Illustrator/InDesign/WhatEver.
posted by adamrice at 9:04 AM on April 11, 2007

If you're not in a hurry, I'm half wondering if it might work out cheaper and easier to call someone in China (I've used Empire here in Beijing), the email them your text/design, have them fax the proofs back and then mail you the finished cards. Never done it at that distance myself, but just a thought.
posted by Abiezer at 10:19 AM on April 11, 2007

If you can print it in chinese, you can also give them the hard copy to scan from. A jpg or acrobat file would work as well.
posted by aisleofview at 2:37 PM on April 11, 2007