School me on font use in photoshop

[Glitch]

I'm working on making a temporary business card (hopefully before a car show in 2 hours!) and I'm having font trouble. I've always had this problem and never could understand how to fix it.

I looked up the size of a business card - 3.5" x 2" and plugged that into Photoshop. I then found a sample card I liked and wanted to model from. So I started placing text. However the text is very low quality and blocky on the 252px x 144px canvas. The only way I could seem to fix this was to scale up the canvas quite a bit (4x size).

What am I doing wrong? I'm a bit of a newbie at the "types" of fonts, such as truetype etc.

Can someone give me a pointer as to how to make my fonts very nice and crisp and clean?

 

[Hoogle]

first of all check your image resolution image>size resolution should be 72 - 300
secondly a good tip in your preferences
edit>preferences>units and rulers the 2nd box down should be type change that to pixels rather than point then it automatically clicks in with image resolution

 

[Glitch]

first of all check your image resolution image>size resolution should be 72 - 300
secondly a good tip in your preferences
edit>preferences>units and rulers the 2nd box down should be type change that to pixels rather than point then it automatically clicks in with image resolution

Thanks. I will try this next time.

My resolution was at 72. I will try 300 next time. I also made the change to pixels. Thanks again for the help.

here's what I came up with for a business card (scaled up): Card

It's still a work in progress. Only about a half hour put into it. I needed it for a car show I am going to in an hour.

Future plans are to add color, specifically with something reflecting in the camera lens with rays of color coming out of it. But that's over my head for now.

 

[Hoogle]

nice simple design is the guideline indicating where the bleed point begins
also wouldnt you be better off changing the radial gradient to linear so the white end is over the camera lense because by the time that prints i can imagine will be hard to read black on black just a thought test it at home before going to print for a rough idea

 

[Glitch]

Yeah, the stroke outline and gradient were a temporary thing to improve readability. It will be different in the future.

nice simple design is the guideline indicating where the bleed point begins
also wouldnt you be better off changing the radial gradient to linear so the white end is over the camera lense because by the time that prints i can imagine will be hard to read black on black just a thought test it at home before going to print for a rough idea

 

[Glitch]

I did this in about an hour. It's upscaled because at the time I didn't know how to get nice smooth fonts. It's a start of what I want. My name's font will be changed and I want an object reflecting in the lens casting out rays of color (this should help with black on black issues).

When I scaled down my temporary card, the fonts were blocky and unreadable. Oh well. Lesson learned.

Business Card Link Here