How to set new Card Design for purely Virtual cards

 

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

In this course, we'll look at what you need to do before you start issuing purely virtual cards. This course will guide you through the steps that precede card issuance and we will also show you in more detail how to work with the new card design.

As prerequisities to this course, please take a look at our other courses “How to understand Serial Ranges

 

 


A very first step, on your part before we start dealing with the issuance of cards is the design approval from the ISO office. It is impossible to start without this step and it is crucial for issuing cards. After the ISO office approves your designs, you need to start dealing with the license numbers for the cards for which you have the agreed designs. License numbers are always firmly tied to individual cards. For each type of card, there must be a design first and then license numbers.

 

New card design

Once you have these two steps, we can start setting up within the ALIVE PLATFORM.

In the first step, we will show you where in NCBD you will find a place to upload your new design.
Go to the License Management - Card Designs tab.
After that, you will see the Create Card Design button in the upper left corner.

You can now start creating your new design. Upload the first and second pages of the approved design that you have available and name it.

If you are creating a new design as an additional product, when, for example, it will be available at a different price than the standard design, you need to set this fact in the design properties. You have this option in the upper right corner. Here you set the necessary designation and price.

 

Setting new design

For horizontal page we recommend to upload image in PNG or JPG format with resolution of 1519 x 956 pixels, RGB color space, without rounded corners and with no additional space around the card artwork itself.

Adding next pages Using “Add Page” button at the very bottom, you can also add third, fourth, etc. page of your cards. However, adding pages is relevant only for virtual cards used within the mobile application created by GTS Alive. Only this application is able to display further pages. If you don’t use this application, only the first and second page is relevant for you.

Adding placeholders For each page of your design, a set of buttons for adding placeholders is present. These are “Add Text”, “Add Image” and “Add Barcode”. When choosing any of them, new placeholder is added into your design. Note the “Properties” window on the right side, where you can define specific properties of your placeholder.

TEXT For text placeholder, you can choose several values that will be displayed as content of the placeholder when the card is printed. Names of the values are self-explanatory. The only value that can lead to confusion is “CUSTOM”. This is designed to display values stored in custom fields (see further).

Position – you can define the position of the placeholder manually, just using drag&drop, but you can also define it more precisely using the offset (in milimeters) from Left and Top of the design borders.

Font Size – you can adjust the size of text within specified placeholder using 0,1 step. Default size is 3.

Font Color – black, white and grey text color are available

Alignment – text alignment according to the placeholder

Rotation – text rotation. Please make sure your design meets ISO standards before you overuse rotation.

Important note: when the defined width of the placeholder is too short, the text that goes outside its borders will be cropped. Take this into account when defining your placeholders! In case you want to delete the placeholder, just mark it with your mouse and click “Remove Placeholder” button.

 

Vertical card design

 

For both new and existing digital card designs, it is now necessary to add a vertical side to the card. Both types of visuals will belong to a single design, sharing the same design name and number. The number of vertical sides for a design does not have to match the number of horizontal sides. For the vertical design, only the first side is mandatory, and the additional number of sides is optional. The vertical design is intended only for displaying cards in their digital form and is not meant for printing. As a result, the vertical design will not appear in the card printing options.

To add a vertical design, go under the vertical tab in the designer.

 

Assigning Card Design to Card Issuer/Partner

To be able to use your defined Card Design, you have to assign this design to Card Issuers/Partners. In both cases, you do it in Card Issuer/Partner editing mode. In “Card Settings” window, choose the correct card type and in drop down menu, select your Card Design. Don’t forget to confirm this change by clicking “Save card issuer”/”Save partner” button!

If you want this Card Design to become the default one, in the left vertical menu, go to Licence Management –> Card Designs and click on “Default Designs” button. In drop-down menus, you can define default Card Designs for different types and forms of cards. Again, don’t forget to save your changes.

 

Cleaning up old designs

Before issuing purely virtual IDs, we recommend going through and making the necessary adjustments to all designs used.

If you have issued cards with designs where the placeholders are incorrectly set or the incorrect backgrounds of the cards have been uploaded, these cards will be displayed incorrectly, for example, even in the application.

  • The background of the design must always be empty - it must not contain already filled fields, photos or sample ID numbers.

  • To design the card, you need to place all the required placeholders in the right place and size.

  • We recommend always testing designs in a test environment and making sure that all information is written on the card legibly and without problems before adding it to production.

Examples of poorly set designs and their display in the Portal and ALIVE App: