GeekLimit

How to design the perfect business card

Posted by The Technocrat | Filed under Geeky

I wrote this monster comment over at Atariboy, and thought I’d mirror it here. After all, fellow Technocrats, if you’re going to change the world, you’re going to need to get in the door first. Consider the business card your “bait”. Here are some ideas:

For a business card, if someone is going to promote yourself as (any kind of) unique-thinker, consider using a non-standard layout. Anyone who will want your card is interested in you making them stand out with your unique designs.

You don’t have to get crazy here, then it’s over-developed. Keep it simple. In the past, I have had great success with having a vertically-laid-out card, as opposed to a traditional horizontal one. Also consider inverting the colors (sorry – ‘colours’) on your card. Make the background blue, the logo black, and the text white.

Another trick I’ve done is make the background of the card a different color than the front. More expensive to print, but it looks pretty unique when you have a purple-background card with yellow text, and the back of the card is yellow.

When you want to get really crazy, you can order cards with transparency and all that. Consider your card with a transparent logo… expensive, but the idea is that you would do a short run of those to attach to your resume. They’ll remember you, and if the stupid card gets you the thinking-out-of-the-box-designing-robots-of-the-future job, then the thinking-out-of-the-box card was worth it…

The only key here is that you (or anyone) need to choose a card design that matches what you have to offer. If I saw a card with all sorts of crap on it, it’ll make me think that person is all about over-designing things. If they just have a tweak or two, definitely cool, but the person had better have an idea or two to back it up!

Comments (0) | March 14th, 2006