As a graphic designer for a printing company, a lot of my work involves coming up with new and innovative business card ideas. Business cards are a fantastic marketing tool that most new businesses overlook. Over the last few years I have seen some of the most innovative and unique design ideas guaranteed to make a great impression.
Inspiration
The best way to find inspiration is to take in to account your current style of marketing materials, including your website and company logo. If your website is artistic and full of colour, you should try to illustrate this on your business card.
For the more minimalistic and simple websites, you should pay close attention to the fine design. Perhaps invest in high quality printing effects like engraving and embossing.
Remember, your business card is a mini portfolio of your work so it’s important you let your personal style shine through to impress those potential business clients. The sky is the limit when it comes to design, from colours to die cutting so you can be as creative as you like.
Information
The most common mistake made on business cards is the amount of information included. Always keep in mind the primary function of your card is for potential clients and customers to easily obtain your contact information. There is no need for you to include everything, remember less is always more!
You should use the following:
- Company name
- General details of what your company does
- Phone number
- Email
- Website URL
If you use social media to target business, always include your facebook/twitter username. Chances are customers will want to know a little more about you before contacting you, so this will give them immediate access to whom you are and who you interact with.
Innovation
Following are my favourite five examples that run the gambit from scalloped edges and elaborate die cutting, to one that is intended to be planted in the ground. Always keep in mind the message you want to portray to potential customers. Distinctive cards mean that you are about to get noticed and gain business!
One of my new clients recently inspired me to write this one. She has started up a new business and wanted an original professional logo design but didn’t want to pay the usual graphic design fees.
She chose and paid for a new and exclusive logo design at bestlookinglogos.com for $50. And then customized her own colour choices for an extra $10. Here it is:
Then she wanted some business cards designed and printed with her new logo incorporated. She was able to have the same professional designer who designed her logo, design her business cards to suit and have 1000 printed for $179 – all inclusive of new artwork. Here is what she had to say about the process and outcome..
“Thanks again for your great service, I just need to explain to my graphic designer client why I didn’t go with them for this but they certainly wouldn’t have been able to provide me with my new identity and business cards for under $250. I am sure you will hear from me again.”
And here is her business card design as it turned out:
For more information on the same service and price contact Twilight Emerald Print Design anytime.
Lisa is a graphical and pre-press designer with more than 15 years experience. She runs her own agency Twilight Emerald from Ballarat, Victoria Australia.
I found an interesting article written recently suggesting that with the future on the internet with the digital age, that good old fashioned hard copy business cards may become obsolete. Click here for more.
So they suggest that google is the new business card, but is it? If you’ve just met a potential client for the first time, will they remember your name in order to google you? Would they go to the trouble even if they did?
I don’t deny for a second that the internet is a powerful way to advertise you and your business, but it has its place. There are still plenty of other relevant media. And a business card in the hand can say so much about your business, it’s traits and your personality. Not to mention reminding the potential client you just met of who you are, when they pull it our of their wallet or pocket again.
Most google listings will consist of a few lines of basic arial font, blue and black text. A hard copy business card, with its stock texture and quality, its colours, its images, its logo and stylised fonts says so much more about you and gives you the chance to portray exactly the customized image and level of quality that you want to portray. I can’t think of a single business who would do without their business cards. Even small start-up businesses who can’t afford anything else will have a basic business card to give out to people they meet.
Can a website replace a business card? Again I would say, they have to remember your url first, and having your website address printed on a business card to hand out is invaluable in this respect.
Lisa is a graphical and pre-press designer with more than 15 years experience. She runs her own agency Twilight Emerald from Ballarat, Victoria Australia.
This recruitment company had some clear ideas on where they wanted to go with their design. They had created a logo design and colour scheme of black and cream/gold.
The logo design was not created in vector format, so I recreated it and then added the shading or embossing effect in InDesign afterward on the ‘me’.
The client had chosen the wallpaper like pattern that they liked and I found it under ‘damask wallpaper’ in a stock images site. The difficult part was getting it into the right colour and screen strength to suit a black background.
The problem with using a subtle screen image or pattern on a solid black background is that the black ink tends to overwhelm the subtle pattern when on the printing press, and there is a great risk that the pattern could disappear altogether in print, not looking at all like the screen proof. So I had to lighten the pattern on screen about 15% more, to accomodate for the fact it would darken in print amongst the solid background.
The back of the card was a bit easier, because on a light background, the darker coloured pattern tends to darken and show up more rather than disappear into the background.
In the end the print result was great, with a nice subtle result for the damask pattern against the black background, while still maintaining a clear image.
Lisa is a graphical and pre-press designer with more than 15 years experience. She runs her own agency Twilight Emerald from Ballarat, Victoria Australia.
With this business card design, the request was to keep the text small and simple and feature a large butterfly, with the colour blue in mind.
In this case I think simple but effective has really worked for the design. The printed product came out great too. I’ve always liked the clean white look though it has to be done with the right image or it can fall really flat. Generally isolated images work best when you want to retain a lot of white space.
Having seen how this came out I’m inspired to do more designs like this. Often I spend quite a lot of time on headers and logos for company names, but I think that it is not always necessary to have a lavish header. Sometimes the focus can be more on the imagery and that works.
Lisa is a graphical and pre-press designer with more than 15 years experience. She runs her own agency Twilight Emerald from Ballarat, Victoria Australia.
