Brand YOU: Business Cards (Part 2)

Brand YOU is an ongoing series of articles about building your image. As a designer you create, redefine, and enhance brands and identities everyday. You can choose just the right typeface and signature Pantone for your clients’ brands; knowing when to slap a client’s logo onto the side of a bus and when to emblaze it across a bottle of hot sauce is second nature to you. But how adept are you at building your most important brand, your own?

Often the most difficult to conceptualize and make real, self-promotion and personal brand building is a challenge for designers. The Brand YOU series helps take the frustration and mystery out of building your identity and your image.

See Also:  Brand YOU:  Business Cards (Part 1)

You Are Here:  Brand YOU:  Business Cards (Part 2)

We left off the first segment of Brand YOU:  Business Cards with you deciding what information to place on your new b.c. Now that you have everything you want to write on your b.c. let’s look at the basics of designing it, and the media available for business cards.

Today’s business cards don’t necessarily have to be printed on paper. Modern technology allows for printing on a variety of materials including metal (not foil embossed, actual sheet metal), wood (they’re thick, though), magnetic sheeting (keep it away from your PDA!), self-adhesive, transparent mylar, and plastic. At last year’s HOW Design Conference the rest of Team Adobe and I handed out three-color, frosted plastic business cards that served as coupons for one free how-to call (a $35 value) to our new Adobe Expert Support group. As many graphic designers and agency principals commented on the physical aspects of the cards as on the new Expert Support product offering. Plastic b.c.s are new and garner a lot of attention. They will, of course, become passé just like magnetic cards.

Modern business card options. From left to right:  “Snapcard,” a combination of postcard with perforated business card; standard 4c (4-color process) business card with gold foil stamped maple leaf; round cornered 4c; “Gold” one color metal; “Silver” one color metal; one color transparent (printing in reverse on back); blank CD business card. Second row:  magnetic with lamination; plastic 4c (both sides), .030 thickness; Post-It® Notes business card/pad; hologram silver foil stamped on 4c with die-cut rounded corners; blind embossed with one-color raised print on linen stock; translucent vinyl .030 thick card with two spot colors. Third row:  4c tent-card scored for folding.

The options for escaping the standard 2” x 3.5” paper business card don’t end with simply changing the stock either. Embossing and foil stamping, used judiciously, can add a third-dimension to a simple business card, instilling the user experience with tactile sensation without abandoning paper all together. Custom die-cuts can also add tactile sense as well as viewer interaction. Imagine a business card for a company that sells presentation supplies, including ring binders. How would you design the card? How about punching three holes straight through the card along the top? Wouldn’t that catch the eye?

Folding cards aren’t new, but they are (thankfully) used sparingly. For most clients the resistance to die-cut b.c.s with a fold is based more in the high cost of die-cutting and finishing than in a brand-based reason against them. Of course, many clients being on the traditional side in at least a few ways, have difficulty thinking outside the hard programming of their business education that says a b.c. is flat, rectangular, and static. Some think it is the height of radical creativity to set a b.c. vertically, designing it in portrait rather than landscape. The pervasiveness of this bias, as ingrained in business as the illogical (and irritating) practice of putting two spaces after a period (ironically borrowed from book typesetting in the early Twentieth Century), creates opportunity for those savvy enough to break out of the b.c. box. Any time a belief is so entrenched in a culture or system as that of rectangular, paper b.c.s, there exists the opportunity to gain tremendous attention by violating that belief.

So, when considering designs for a Brand YOU b.c., what should you be considering?

First and foremost, look at Brand YOU. If the brand is about traditional, grass-roots values in design and consulting, don’t leap to make plastic or metal business cards. Forget about the CD-ROM b.c.s. If Brand YOU is about bleeding edge technology meets clean, simple design principles, then metal or clear plastic might be for you, but wood won’t be. The media you choose must enhance the design, and communicate Brand YOU; don’t pick a material and design around it. Design your Brand YOU b.c. first, then choose a media that compliments and augments that design.

Each b.c. media has its own limitations, so your design may rule it out. Or, you may need to change your design. Metal cards, for example, can’t hold much ink. Aluminum isn’t a porous material, so ink doesn’t penetrate like it does with paper. Two colors on a metal b.c. is pushing it. The same problem exists with some plastic cards, such as the “invisible circus” sample card above. Since the material doesn’t absorb ink, drying times increase. Add too much ink on there and you won’t just have problems with the resolution and saturation; you’ll be paying your printer for longer time on his drying rack.

When designing your Brand YOU b.c. there are fundamental rules to follow:

• A landscape b.c. is 3.5” wide by 2” deep. For a portrait, swap the measurements.
• It has to be in the CMYK color space, not RGB. Most creatives design in RGB or Lab mode for their wider gamuts, but for press output, the final result must be CMYK. Since CMYK has a smaller gamut (range of colors), watch for color changes when you convert. If color does shift, you’ll need to change the color as best you can; you can’t simply leave it in RGB to try to take advantage of the larger range. It doesn’t work that way.
• Since paper can shift on a press, you need to alot an eighth of an inch inside the border of your card. Don’t set type or other important elements any closer to any edge of a card than 1/8” or you run the risk of cutting it off.
• If your design touches any edge of the card (a bleed), you’ll need to account for the bleed space. Extend any bleeding object(s) like a background or rule off all sides it touches by 1/8” to avoid gaps in the ink if the paper shifts on press.
• Decide whether you need to make use of the back of the card. Does all your information fit comfortably on the front? If it’s crowded, consider using the back.
• Determine your budget for b.c.. Each color adds to the cost of the printing-a two-color job is less expensive than 4c, which is less expensive than 4c plus two spot colors. Additional cost factors include media-some papers are more expensive than others, plastic and metal and more expensive than paper-embossing, diecutting, folding, coatings (UV, aqueous, chromekote, etc.), and number of sides. Printing on the back side is, to a printing press, the same as another print job. You will only buy the media once, but you’ll need separate film for each plate on the back, as well as setup and cleaning costs for each plate on the press (often called “screen charge”).
• While working with the budget for your b.c., consider the fact that you’ll need letterhead that matches your Brand YOU b.c.s too. You don’t want to pour your entire self-promotion budget into b.c.s and have to send letters on laser-printed letterhead with off-the-shelf white envelopes. Additionally, any design you put on your b.c. must be able to be carried through (with reasonable approximation) to your letterhead, envelopes, brochures, and any other identity material you develop.
• Do it 1-up. Throw away your 8- and 12-up business card templates. Put one b.c. in a digital file (Illustrator, InDesign, Quark, PDF, whatever) and let the printer do the imposition. Unless the printer offers you discount for doing the imposition yourself, let him do it. Printers and service bureaus know how they need it for their particular workflow, and they usually have automated means of doing the imposition. Many times a printer will gang your job on the same sheet of paper as two or three other print jobs for different clients, thus reducing the waste and overhead cost of paper. If you create an 8-up b.c. layout, the printer usually has to undo that before imposing the job the way he needs it.

Conventional wisdom holds that all your contact information should appear on the front of your b.c. There’s a time and place to break every design rule, but rarely is there a justification for breaking this rule. Are there reasons for splitting up the contact information so that it doesn’t all appear on one surface? Yes. Have I done it? Yes, but rarely. Most of the time I’ve done it the cards have been die-cut and folded, so some contact info appears on the front flap, more on inside surfaces. Remember the whole point of your b.c. is to make it easy for a potential client to contact you by whatever means she wishes; you don’t want to make her work to find your e-mail address or phone number.

Everyone in your organization needs her own business card. Don’t put more than a single name on a card. Though this may seem like a way to save a few bucks, it will hurt Brand YOU. First, it looks cheap. Second, it can confuse the recipient as to who she actually met from your organization. If printing cards for all your top personnel is too expensive a proposition, here’s a suggestion to help minimize the cost. Design the card so that the name is only printed in one color and doesn’t touch other ink (like a background). If the name is knocked out of a background, make the background, at least in that area, one color. Then, to change the design from one name to another, only one new plate is required. This means five pieces of film from an imagesetter instead of eight, and it means that three colors and screens get double-duty on the press while only the fourth plate changes. This will save you in setup charges (it’s not the amount of ink that costs at a printer, it’s the number of plates and the setup time they require).

For God’s sake, don’t use free business cards or off-the-shelf perforated business cards with a pre-printed background. You are a graphic designer. If your card looks like the one shown here, then you’re telling the world that Brand YOU doesn’t have the talent to do its own b.c.s. Why would a client hire you to design something for him if you use pre-printed or cookie cutter designs for yourself?

Even if you don’t offer b.c. or print design, your b.c. is the voice of Brand YOU when you aren’t there to speak for it. Do you want it to shout “Flat Broke! Amateur!”? Wouldn’t it be better if your b.c. proclaimed:  “Successful! Professional!”? Freebie or template cards from VistaPrint.com or CardBuilderPro.com don’t work for designers. Even if they look nice, they’re so common place now that people recognize them as free and unoriginal on sight. Those that don’t merely have to flip the cards over to see VistaPrint’s ad emblazoned on the back.

If you can’t design a decent b.c. yourself (I hear you, web designers), find someone who can do it for you. Find a graphic designer and offer your services in trade; she designs a b.c. and letterhead for you, you help her upgrade her site to standards-compliant xHTML and CSS. If you honestly can’t find anyone to design a good b.c. for you, contact me. I’ll design professional cards for Brand YOU at a reasonable rate. I’d rather design a b.c. for someone for half price than have another VistaPrint or pre-printed HP stock b.c. pressed into my palm by an otherwise talented individual.

Your b.c. is the voice of Brand YOU when you aren’t there in person. Design a b.c. that promotes Brand YOU visually the way you would verbally in person.

In next month’s third segment of Brand YOU:  Business Cards we’ll examine some good and bad examples of b.c. design. In the meantime, work up a few designs for your Brand YOU b.c. Run the sketches by your friends, family, and associates. The best way to elicit spontaneous, unfiltered feedback is to e-mail your sketches to them (or stick them on a web page and e-mail the URL), and ask your reviewers to immediately jot down whatever comes to mind about your designs. Don’t give any description or justification in advance; let the designs speak for themselves, the way they would to a potential client.

[Special thanks to Slava Apel at Amazing Print Corp for the business card samples featured in the array above (all except the “Adobe Experts” card).]

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