My new business cards
July 21, 2008 at 6:52 pm
Surprisingly enough, even though I've been working for the thick part of a decade now, I've never actually had my own business cards. I've lost count the amount of occasions I've been out and about in the past year and fumbled around with bits of paper and a pen when exchanging details with people I've met at conferences, or on the tube etc. I made it my mission - along with this site - to get some made up.
Business cards are pretty simple to create really and ever so handy to have on your person. I just had a few basic pre-requisites with mine: I wanted to make sure the cards I produced clearly stated what I did; contained my contact details; reflected a little bit of my personality and also integrated nicely with the branding I had created for this site. All pretty straightforward really.
It was definitely an advantage already having the design of the site in place in terms of the assets, colours and typography. The design process consisted of threading all of these the creative elements together in Adobe Illustrator; it probably took me less than 3 hours from paper to the finished vector drawings - front and back! As I said, the design was the easy bit.
We're generally spoiled when producing work digitally for the web. Sure, we have lots of cross-browser compatibility issues to deal with but ultimately we have a pretty good idea of how our work will look on screen, because it's been specifically designed for screen. However, when it comes to designing for print there is always a leap of faith associated with it in terms of the reproduction of colour from screen media to printed media - unless you can have a few tests printed off, which is expensive. So the biggest challenge I faced was choosing a reliable company to actually print my newly designed business cards with.
I decided the best way of choosing was through natural advocacy. If people have good experiences with companies they tend to talk about them. So I did a search on business cards in Flickr to see where other people were getting theirs printed from; sure enough it didn't take long to find some urls and recommendations.
The company I eventually chose was Print100. The quality looked good (on screen admittedly) and people were raving about them; they seemed fast and reasonably priced. Upon closer inspection they also supported: Spot UV varnishing; hot stamping; rounded corners, diecutting etc.
They certainly didn't disappoint. They have a very quick turn around time and their prices are indeed very reasonable - they also have free delivery on all their products right now! The whole process from the upload of my original vector art work to the business cards being delivered to my front door was less than 9 days - this is hugely impressive. If you haven't got one get in touch and I'll get you one.
For those interested: paper weight is 230 gsm with matt lamination and spot UV filtering applied (for the shiny bits).
July 31, 2008 at 8:45 pm
Many thanks Arseny. I’ll send you some if you would like? I have rather a lot of them right now.
August 01, 2008 at 9:41 am
Look really nice, I need to get some proper cards sorted.
August 01, 2008 at 1:24 pm
Love the cards - thanks too for the recommendation. I need to get some done and I was looking for a company.
August 01, 2008 at 8:24 pm
Miles,
Thank you for letting me know about http://www.print100.com via e-mail. Your help is very precious!
My only problem is that print100.com charges an extra 60% for Romanian orders/delivery: http://www.print100.com/global/cgi/delivery.aspx
So, if they’ll produce for me stationery materials in value of $200, I’ll have to pay $320. Quite expensive…
Is there any other viable option for me? Any other company?…
August 02, 2008 at 6:50 am
Great design. I have been presented this card in person, and I was very impressed by the quality, cost and turnaround. The card itself is on lighter stock than usual (generally 260 - 280gsm is used), which suggest that they are feeding this through some high end proofing machine built solely for cards and other stationary bits, hence the quick turnaround. That said, the matt lamination on the card makes it more robust and almost tear free than traditional paper card, aided further by rounded corners, preventing any chance of creasing the corners when sliding in and out of the wallet.
August 04, 2008 at 2:56 pm
Exceptional design. Very innovative and eye catching. Are you able to enlighten me on the font used? Am needing to design some business cards myself? Thanks.
September 10, 2008 at 7:58 am
Thanks for the suggestion
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September 24, 2008 at 11:28 am
I really like your article very much. Thanks for sharing with us. I really like it very much.
September 28, 2008 at 12:16 am
The spot uv coating on the business cards really makes a big difference in making them stand out. It shows that you really spent some time thinking about the printing in the design process. I always like the subtle look of spot uv coating on business cards, especially when its a blind spot coating like you have.
September 28, 2008 at 12:26 am
One more quick thing. I think this is a good example of thinking about how you want the finished product then beginning design. I know some designers that to this day will design a business card with 6 pantone colors for a card that will be printed on a full color press.
One quick tip I suggest for full color printing to avoid that “leap of faith” is to get a full color swatch book. Assuming the press uses standard densities on the press you should fairly accurate colors. I purchased a book called “process color manual” from amazon. While I still find it difficult to find colors due to their arrangement in the book it’s still handy to have and helps me talk to customers about colors when using a cmyk process.
November 13, 2008 at 3:51 pm
I wasn’t blaming you, it was my (sometimes lack of) English - not my native language. Glad I got want you meant in the end (and also everything from your latest link).
Arsart wrote:
July 31, 2008 at 11:10 am
Lovely cards! Stunning graphics