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!
The two logos above are a good example of the process of converting from an illustration to a vector and a situation in which this process might need to be employed. There are different approaches to this and I thought I’d share using this example to highlight them.
In this instance, a shire council in rural Victoria, Australia held a competition asking local young people to help choose their logo and visual identity which was to be used on their website and also offline in their print masthead and other materials including large signs. The winning “logo” design, pictured top, happened to be hand drawn in felt-tipped pen (or texta). To be used professionally and to be resized, an amateur design such as this has to be converted into a vector format.
Twilight Emerald was employed to supply the vector art and the result, pictured below, was a manual trace using the pen tool in Adobe Illustrator.
Although Illustrator also has ‘Live Trace’, personally I find it currently doesn’t do a great job for anything even slightly complex. The original illustration just doesn’t look quite the same using that process alone. The Live Trace can work with artistic renditions of a photos, or if a job doesn’t need to be exact. But you can’t beat a manual trace for real attention to detail and accuracy. The final product is far more editable as well. For example, you could change spot colours in specific areas of the illustration to create. Not every designer is up to the task of a manual trace so clients need to be selective of designers with this capability.
Have any experiences with illustrations to vector ? Prefer to use Live Trace or Manual Trace ? If so please feel free to share:”
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.
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.
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.
During the current economic downturn, it can be more important than ever to maintain a strong visual identity for your company.
With petrol prices at an all time high, interest rates skyrocketing and mortgage payments crippling the household budgets, people look to the companies they can trust with their business. A strong visual identity is not just a nice thing to have, it is a necessity, to maintain a strong presence and stress the good value you provide. It shows your unfailing consistency in hard times.
If you don’t already have a strong visual identity then you need to create one, and keep it consistent across all your advertising and materials so that customers and potential customers can recognize your image at a glance. You need to have an image that stands for something in people’s minds.
Have a look at companies like ANZ, Coca Cola, Dove – they all maintain a consistent identity that people know and trust, and they strive to send a message with their image about what they represent. ANZ – representing small businesses and they average homeowner; Coca Cola – their image instantly calls to mind refreshment on a hot summers day, relaxation; Dove – representing inner beauty on the outside for the average woman.
Through graphic design, creating a visual and corporate identity for you, along with the right marketing campaigns you too can have an image for your company that people instantly recognize and trust.
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.
