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!
Promotional flyers are an excellent way to keep your existing clients interested in your products on an ongoing basis. To keep your business pumping steadily. Just when they might have forgotten you, here appear some great new offers from your business that suddenly remind them what a useful resource you are!
One of my favourite most fabulous clients, Guinot (Australia) utliize promotional flyers to keep their australia wide salons informed about their large range of products with specials each month highlighting different products and product ranges they offer. See example above.
Anyone can have promotional flyers designed for their business. They don’t need to necessarily have a vast product range, just offer different specials and sales with time limits and keep your phones ringing.
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.
This logo design was created with a specific target audience in mind, with a particular feel to it as requested by the client.
The client for this design has a start up business with the wonderful idea of a service to facilitate care for the elderly by consulting with the family to come up with the best possible recommendations on what type of care they should receive and where they should go to get it. Their target audience was an upper class market and the design needed to appeal to both the elderly and their families, invoking a feeling of trust, through elegance and class.
The theme was autumn, and the changing seasons and colours that autumn displays, as this seems to represent a natural change of life.
I did three original concepts, but they were thought to be a little bit feminine, so we went more with the browns, away from flowers in more focus on autumn leaves, while keeping the elegant font style from one of those initial concepts.
I created individual illustrations for autumn leaves, which eventually led to an illustration of a tree featuring those leaves with changing colours, and the leaves in motion as they fall, as they wanted an active looking illustration.
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.
