Loyalty & Stamp Card Maker

A stamp card is the cheapest marketing a small shop can buy. It costs a sheet of card, a rubber stamp and about ten minutes of thought. This guide walks through making one on this page: how many boxes to put on it, what the offer wording has to say, what belongs on the back, and how to lay a whole sheet of them out so they can be cut cleanly and printed on both sides without the backs landing on the wrong cards.

From 85.6 mm of card down to an 8 mm box

The default card is 85.6 mm across, but the row of boxes never gets all of that width. A padding figure is worked out first, and it comes from the height of the card: 0.095 of it, held to no less than 2.6 mm and no more than 5.4 mm, then rounded to two decimal places. A card 54 mm tall gives 5.13 mm. That much is kept clear on the left and on the right, so the boxes have 85.6 less 10.26, or 75.34 mm, to sit in.

The space between two boxes is not a separate setting. It is always 0.3 of the box width, which is what keeps the grid in proportion while it shrinks. A row of five boxes therefore needs five box widths plus four gaps: 5 plus 0.3 times 4, or 6.2 box widths. Read that backwards and the largest box that lets five sit in a row is 75.34 shared over 6.2, which is 12.15 mm.

On the automatic setting the tool does not just cram as many boxes into a row as it can. First it asks how many of your wished-for size would go across: 75.34 plus 8 times 0.3, all shared over 8 times 1.3, then rounded down. That is 77.74 over 10.4, which comes to 7. Ten boxes in rows of seven needs two rows. The ten are then spread evenly over those two rows, five and five, instead of being left as a row of seven and a lonely row of three.

Only now is the size settled, and it is the smaller of the two candidates: the 8 mm you asked for, or the 12.15 mm that would fit. So 8 mm stands. The gap is 0.3 of that, or 2.4 mm, and the card gets two rows of five 8 mm boxes. That is exactly how the example card is drawn when you open the page.

Height is checked after that. Two rows of 8 mm boxes with one 2.4 mm gap between them stand 18.4 mm tall. The room they have is the card height, less both paddings, less an allowance for the heading, less the footer line, less 1.2 mm of slack. On the default card that works out at about 28.8 mm, so the block fits and nothing is touched. When it does not fit, the size is cut to whatever makes those rows fill the height instead. Ask for forty boxes and you can watch it happen: seven per row, six rows, and the height brings each box down to about 3.8 mm.

Width does the cutting in the other common case. Force all ten boxes onto a single row and the row needs 10 plus 0.3 times 9, which is 12.7 box widths, so each box becomes 75.34 over 12.7, or 5.93 mm. That is smaller than the 8 mm you asked for by more than the 0.05 mm allowed for rounding, so the note appears: the boxes were shrunk to 5.9 mm. Drop below 5 mm and a second note says so, because at that point a box is nearer the size of a biro tick than a rubber stamp.

• The number you type is the size of the cell, not the size of the ink. A circle is drawn on a 24 unit grid with a radius of 10.4 and a line 1.5 units thick, so its outer edge spans 22.3 of the 24 units. At an 8 mm setting the circle is 7.43 mm across, with about 6.43 mm of clear paper inside the line.
• The room left for the grid is an estimate, not a measurement. It assumes the shop name takes one line and the offer takes one line. A long name that wraps onto two lines will squeeze the boxes, and nothing works the sum out again.
• Text sizes come from the card height as well: the shop name is 0.085 of it, never under 2.8 mm and never over 5.2 mm, and the small footer line is 0.042 of it, between 1.6 and 2.6 mm.
• The coloured header band is allowed 1 mm more room than the other three front styles, since it has its own padding to pay for.
• With a logo loaded, the heading takes whichever is taller: the logo, 9 mm unless you change it, or the two lines of text.
• Boxes are only ever made smaller than the size you ask for, never larger, and the shrinking stops at 2.6 mm.
• The count is held between 1 and 40 boxes and the wished-for size between 3 and 20 mm. Clearing either box falls back to the defaults, 10 boxes at 8 mm, rather than to zero.
• The word in the reward box is cut to 12 characters. It is drawn at 0.3 of the box for four letters or fewer, then shrinks in proportion: Free in an 8 mm box is 2.4 mm tall, while Free drink is 1.08 mm. The faint numbers in the other boxes are 0.32 of the box.
• Nothing here knows anything about ink. A rubber stamp presses wider than its rubber, and ink spreads on card, so choose a box a shade larger than the stamp you own.

Eight to a sheet, and the swap that puts each back behind its own front

The sheet grid begins with a fixed 8 mm margin on all four edges, a working guess at the strip most printers cannot reach. The number of columns is the paper width, less those two margins, plus one gap, shared over one card plus one gap, rounded down. That spare gap in the top of the sum is there because five cards in a row need only four gaps between them.

Run it for A4 and a bank card. Across: 210 less 16 is 194, plus the 4 mm gap is 198, shared over 85.6 plus 4, which is 89.6. That gives 2.21, so two columns. Down: 297 less 16 is 281, plus 4 is 285, shared over 54 plus 4, which is 58. That gives 4.91, so four rows. Two by four is the eight per sheet quoted in the line under the preview.

The block is then centred rather than pushed into a corner. Two cards and one gap measure 175.2 mm, so 210 less 175.2, halved, leaves 17.4 mm at each side. Four cards and three gaps measure 228 mm, so 297 less 228, halved, leaves 34.5 mm top and bottom. The 8 mm figure only ever decides what fits; the margins you actually get are usually wider than that, and they always match on opposite edges, which is what lets a stack of identical sheets be trimmed in one go.

Change one setting and the count moves. The 90 by 50 mm business card gives two columns and five rows, so ten to a sheet. A7 at 105 by 74 mm gives one column and three rows, so three. Standing the bank card on end gives three by three, so nine. Setting the gap to zero fits ten bank cards on A4 rather than eight, at the cost of leaving a blade nothing to aim at.

The quantity you type decides the sheets: cards shared over the eight that fit, rounded up. Ask for 30 and that is four sheets, since 30 over 8 leaves a remainder of 6 and two positions on the last sheet stay blank. The note works out that you should round up to 32 and take the two spare cards. Switching the back on doubles the page count, so those 30 cards come to eight pages.

Then the swap. The back page reuses the very same grid of positions, but the card printed at each position is worked out as the row number times the column count, plus the column count less one, less the column number. In plain terms it is the same row, counted from the other side. With two columns the top left position on the back page carries card two, and the top right carries card one. Turn the printed sheet over on its long edge and every back lands behind its own front.

Crop marks are two hairlines at each corner, 3.5 mm long and 0.2 mm thick, each starting 1 mm clear of the card. That is eight marks per card, all of them outside it, so nothing is ever printed on the card itself. The tool also writes a page rule that names your paper and sets the printer margin to nothing, because the sheet already carries margins of its own and a second set would push every card off its marks.

Card numbers are counted from the position in the whole run rather than the position on a sheet. The number is your starting value plus that position, rounded to a whole number, padded with leading zeros to the width you chose, with the prefix added in front. Four digits is the default and one to eight is allowed. Starting at 1 with a prefix of KG-, the eighth card reads KG-0008 and the twenty-fourth reads KG-0024, and the run carries straight on across sheet boundaries.

• That 8 mm edge margin is fixed and nothing checks it. Some printers cannot get within 5 mm of the paper edge and some need more, and neither is asked about.
• A card is never turned on its side to squeeze more onto a sheet. If you want upright cards, choose one of the portrait sizes yourself.
• The swap assumes your printer flips paper on the long edge. Short edge flipping is just as common and is not detected. Take one test sheet through and check both sides against each other before you commit a pack of stock.
• Quantity is held between 1 and 600 cards and the gap between 0 and 30 mm. Clearing the quantity gives you exactly one full sheet.
• A margin of nothing in the page rule is a request, not a promise. Leave the print dialogue on fit to page and the whole sheet is scaled by a few per cent, which makes the crop marks lie.
• Every sheet is a plain rectangle of one card size. Sizes are never mixed and odd shapes are never nested to save paper.
• The preview is measured in millimetres, so a card measured on a sheet printed at full size should match the figure on screen. What your printer does beyond that is outside what any layout can fix.

What the little boxes are actually doing

A loyalty card works because of something very ordinary: people do not like leaving a job half done. A card with four stamps on it is a small unfinished task in somebody's wallet, and it pulls them back past your door instead of the shop next door. That is the whole mechanism. It does not need an app, a points balance or an email address.

It also gives you a rough count. If you hand out sixty cards in a month and thirty come back completed, you know something about how often your regulars visit. That is more than most small shops can say.

The paper version has one more advantage over an app. Nobody has to sign up for anything. A card is handed over in three seconds at the till, and the customer decides whether to keep it. That is the right amount of friction for a coffee, a haircut or a car wash.

Say what is free, and after how many

The offer line is the single most important thing on the card, and it is where most cards go wrong. "10 coffees, 11th free" and "Buy 9 coffees, the 10th is on us" sound similar and mean different things. One asks for ten paid visits, the other for nine. If the wording and the number of boxes disagree, your staff will be arguing about it at the till within a fortnight.

So decide the number of paid visits first, then count the boxes. If the last box is the reward, ten boxes means nine paid visits and a free tenth. If you want ten paid visits, ask for eleven boxes. The tool leaves this to you on purpose, because both schemes are perfectly reasonable and only you know which one your margins can carry.

Be specific about what the reward is, too. "A free coffee" invites somebody to ask for the largest speciality drink on the board. "A regular hot drink of your choice" does not. Put the precise wording in the terms on the back and keep the front line short and cheerful.

The corner label is the small line of capitals in the top right. It is there to say what the card is at a glance when it is face up on a counter next to a receipt and a parking ticket. "Loyalty card", "Stamp card" or "Coffee club" all work.

How many boxes, and how big they need to be

Between eight and twelve boxes suits most shops. Fewer than six and the reward feels too cheap to be worth chasing. More than about fifteen and the card feels like homework, and it will be lost long before it is full.

The size of each box is not a design choice, it is a measurement. Go and find the rubber stamp you intend to use and measure the rubber, not the wooden handle. A stamp that is 10 mm across needs a box of about 10 mm, with a whisker of room so a slightly off-centre press still lands inside the line. Ink spreads a little on card, so err on the generous side.

The box size on this page is treated as a maximum rather than an instruction. If twelve boxes at 10 mm will not fit across a card 85 mm wide, they are shrunk until they do, and a note appears telling you the size they settled at. That is deliberate. Silently letting the row run off the edge of the card would be worse, and so would refusing to draw anything.

If the note says the boxes have come out under 5 mm, take it seriously. At that size a box is smaller than most stamps and roughly the size of a tick from a biro. Either cut the number of boxes, move up to a bigger card, or set fewer boxes per row so they stack over more lines.

Boxes per row is normally best left on the automatic setting, which spreads them evenly so you do not get a tidy row of five followed by a lonely single box. Force a number when you want a particular look: two rows of five reads as ten at a glance, while three rows of four reads as twelve.

The shapes are outlines rather than solids, because a solid shape would swallow the number printed inside it. Circles are the safe default. Hearts suit a florist, stars a toy shop, and the coffee cup is exactly as literal as it sounds. If you switch on the tint, each box gets a very light wash of the accent colour, which makes an unstamped card look less like a form.

Choosing a card size a wallet will accept

Bank card size, 85.6 by 54 mm, is the default for a good reason: every wallet already has a slot that shape. A card that fits the slot survives. A card that has to be folded gets thrown away.

The business card sizes are there for shops that already have printed business cards and want the loyalty card to match. The UK and Indian standard is 90 by 50 mm, mainland Europe uses 85 by 55 mm, and the American card is 3.5 by 2 inches. Any of them will do; they differ by a couple of millimetres.

A7, at 105 by 74 mm, is the one to reach for when you have twenty boxes to fit or a lot of terms to print. It will not go in a card slot, but it will sit in a handbag or a diary, which is fine for a garden centre or a hairdresser where the visits are months apart.

The two portrait sizes are worth a look if your logo is tall, or if you want the card to feel different from every other card in the wallet. Be aware that a narrow card makes the shop name wrap onto two lines sooner.

Colour, and what a cheap printer will do to it

There are three colours to set: the card, the text and the accent. The accent is used for the stamp boxes, the bar or band on the front, and the heading on the back.

The safest scheme by far is a white or near-white card with dark text and one strong accent. It uses very little ink, it photocopies well if you ever need to, and the stamp ink shows up clearly against it. A dark card looks wonderful on screen and is a nuisance in practice: it eats toner, it curls when the sheet is heavily covered, and a rubber stamp in dark ink is nearly invisible on it. If you do want a dark card, use a light stamp pad and test it before printing a hundred.

The word in the reward box is drawn in whichever of black or white is easier to read against your accent colour, worked out from the brightness of the colour you chose. The same goes for the text on a coloured header band. That is one less thing to check, but it is not a substitute for looking at a printed sample.

The front styles change the decoration and nothing else. Plain is just the card. The accent bar is a stripe down the leading edge, which is the one that shows when the card is in a wallet. The header band puts the name in a solid block of colour, which is bold and uses noticeably more ink. The inset outline draws a fine ruled border, which suits a serif typeface and an old-fashioned shop.

What belongs on the back

The back is where the awkward questions get answered before they are asked. Four or five short lines is plenty. Say that one stamp is given per visit rather than per item, or a customer buying four coffees for the office will expect four stamps. Say that stamps are given at the till at the time of purchase, not added later from a pile of receipts. Say exactly what the reward is. Say that the card cannot be exchanged for cash and that a lost card cannot be replaced.

Each line you type goes on its own line, with a small dot in front of it. Blank lines are ignored, and ten lines is the most that will print. If the terms outgrow the card, the tool notices and says so rather than quietly cutting the last line in half. Shorten a line or move up to a bigger card.

Expiry is worth thinking about. A card with no expiry can come back three years later, when the price of the free item has changed and the person who designed the scheme has left. Two settings are offered. A fixed date is simple and easy for staff to check, but it treats a customer who starts in the last week unfairly. A number of months from the first stamp is fairer, and it means one printed batch does not go stale on the shelf; the cost is that somebody has to write the date on the card at the first visit. Whichever you choose, the wording is printed for you.

Dates can be shown in five formats, because 03/12/2027 means two different days depending on which side of the Atlantic you are standing. If your customers might read it either way, choose the long form: 12 March 2027 cannot be misread.

The dotted name and phone lines are optional, and they change what the card is. Once you write a customer's name and number on it, you are holding personal data, and the rules on how you store it apply. If you only want the loyalty scheme, leave the lines off and the card stays completely anonymous.

Getting many cards onto one sheet

The sheet is laid out in millimetres from the corner of the paper, not in anything relative to your screen. The grid is worked out from the card size, the gap you ask for and the paper, and it is then centred so the margins at the top and bottom match and the left and right match. Even margins matter when you are cutting: a stack of sheets that all share the same geometry can be trimmed together.

The line under the preview tells you how many cards fit on one sheet and how many pages the run comes to. Fill one sheet sets the quantity to exactly that number, which saves a bit of arithmetic. If you ask for a number that is not a multiple, the tool says how many blank positions are left on the last sheet, so you can round up and get the cards for free.

The gap between cards is not just spacing. It is the room a blade needs. With a guillotine, 3 to 5 mm is comfortable. With scissors, give yourself more. A gap of zero puts the cards edge to edge, which only works if your cutter is very accurate and you do not mind a stray line of colour on a neighbour.

Crop marks are the default cutting guide. They are hairlines just outside each corner, which is what a blade is lined up against, and they are outside the card so nothing is printed on the card itself. The dashed outline is easier to follow with scissors, but it draws right on the cutting line, so any wobble shows. Neither is printed if you choose none, which is what you want when a print shop is doing the trimming and has asked for a clean file.

Printing both sides so the backs line up

This is the part that catches people out, and it is invisible until you have wasted a sheet. When you print the fronts and turn the paper over on its long edge, the left-hand column arrives on the right. Print the backs in the same order as the fronts and every card gets its neighbour's terms.

So the back pages here are laid out with the columns reversed. Card one's front is top left, and card one's back is top right on the following page. The pages come out front, back, front, back, which is the order a duplex printer wants.

Printers do not all agree on which edge they flip, and printer drivers offer both. If yours flips on the short edge, or you are feeding the paper back in by hand, do a two-card test first. Print one sheet, hold it up to a window, and see whether the fronts and backs are on top of each other. Thirty seconds of that saves a pack of card.

If you are printing single sided, print the odd pages, put the stack back in the tray, and print the even ones. Take one sheet through first and check which way up the tray wants it. Every printer is different and no amount of care in the design can help with that.

Print settings, card stock and cutting

Two settings in the print box matter more than anything else on this page. Set the scale to 100%, not "fit to page". Fit to page quietly shrinks the sheet by a few per cent to clear the printer's own unprintable border, which moves every card off its crop marks and leaves you with a stack of cards that are almost, but not quite, the size they claim. Then set the margins to none, because the layout already includes its own.

For the paper itself, something around 250 to 300 gsm is right. Ordinary printer paper feels soft after three stamps and is unreadable by the eighth. Card any heavier than about 300 gsm will jam a small office printer, so check what yours takes before you buy a ream. If in doubt, print one sheet of the stock you intend to use before you buy a lot of it.

Cut with a guillotine if you can borrow one. Line the blade up against the crop marks, not against the edge of the card, and cut all the way across the sheet in one pass rather than card by card. Scissors work but every card ends up slightly different, which is more noticeable in a stack than you would think. Rounded corners look smart and can be done with a cheap corner punch afterwards, though a punch takes about a second per corner and a hundred cards is four hundred corners.

Numbering cards, and why you might want to

By default every card in the run is identical, which is what most shops want. Switch on card numbers and each one gets its own, printed small on the back and in the corner of the front.

There are two good reasons to do it. The first is counting: if you know you printed KG-0001 to KG-0240 and you are handing out the two hundreds, you have a real measure of how the scheme is going. The second is that a numbered card is harder to photocopy usefully. Somebody with a scanner can still copy one, but they will be handing over a duplicate number, and two identical numbers coming back is a signal.

You set a prefix, a starting number and how many digits to pad to. Padding matters more than it looks: KG-0007 and KG-0012 sort correctly in a list, while KG-7 and KG-12 do not. The numbering runs on across sheets, so a batch of sixty is numbered one to sixty in one go. When you print next year's batch, start where the last one stopped rather than going back to one.

Keeping the design so next year's batch matches

Everything you type is kept in this browser's own storage as you go. Close the tab, come back tomorrow, and the card is as you left it. Start again wipes it and puts the example back, which is the quickest way out of a design that has gone wrong.

That is enough for this week and not enough for next year. Save design writes the whole thing, logo included, to a small file on your machine. Keep it with your other shop paperwork. When the cards run out, open it here and print another batch that matches exactly, rather than trying to remember which shade of green you used and how many boxes there were.

The file is plain text and you can open it in any text editor if you are curious. If you move to a new computer, or somebody else takes over the printing, that one file is everything they need.

Download PNG is the other way out. It saves each page as an image at twice screen resolution, which is what to send when a local print shop asks for a file rather than a PDF. A run of several pages comes down as a zip of images, one per page. If you want a PDF, use the print box and choose to save rather than to print; every browser can do that, and the result is sharper than an image.

Running the scheme once the cards are printed

Print ten cards before you print two hundred. Give them to staff, use them for a week, and see what people ask. Almost every problem with a stamp card is a wording problem, and it is much cheaper to find it on ten cards than on a box of them.

Decide where the stamp and the ink pad live, and make it somewhere staff can reach without turning round. A stamp kept in a drawer under the till is a stamp that stops being used by the second week. Tell everybody the same rule about how many stamps a large order gets, and write that rule on the back of the card so nobody has to adjudicate.

Finally, a note on what happens here. The card is drawn entirely inside your browser. The wording, the colours, the terms and the logo you choose never leave your device: the logo is read from disk, scaled down and kept in local storage, and no part of this page sends anything anywhere. That matters more than it sounds for a small business, because a loyalty card is a small piece of your commercial plan, and your plans are nobody else's business.