The Art of the Business Card
blog.guykawasaki.com
blog.guykawasaki.com
Keeping it simple. (I'm the sole owner of Avecora, which is why it has my other info on it as well.)
Backside of the card is light grey, so you can write over it if needed. Font size is large enough, but not huge, as Kawasaki's is.
Thoughts?
Some of mine are braille embossed though, but the people I give those to usually don't need to write anything on it.
It's the glossy black ones that are more annoying to me.
If your dad's anything like mine - over 50 and suffering from the torments of age - he won't be able to read your type without squinting through his glasses. He won't get the subtle reference you made in the graphics. And he definitely won't be able to figure out what your phone number is.
Thing is.. many of the people with the money, the power, and the NEED for business cards are those older people with fading eyesight! Do you really think some 20-something upstart needs to see business cards? We've got e-mail, text messaging, and iPhones for that! Business cards are for a wider, more general audience.. so unless you run an avant-garde design agency, design your cards with that general audience in mind.
http://rossboucher.com/downloads/cards.png
Comments welcome.
This is going to sound trivial, but to me, something about the text in the top-right corner on the white side seems off. I think the colors are too dark compared to what you have on the other side.
It might just be my monitor or the fact that they aren't in print to me. Otherwise, I really like the simplicity of the design. Very straight forward and too the point, which is good (and the big print also makes it easier to read).
It looks really good printed actually, which I was a little surprised by.
"something about the text in the top-right corner on the white side seems off"
You're right, and the colors are poor choices. The correct colors looked pretty bad too though, so it was trying to find a balance.
Any recommendation on sites that do business card design?
48 Hour Print - http://www.48hourprint.com/
Vista Print - http://www.vistaprint.com/ (not to be confused w/ Windows Vista
And another creative site I'd recommend checking out is http://www.moo.com/ -- they've got a lot of creative sort of cards. Not necessarily great for business cards, but can work well as thank-you notes and things of that nature.
He doesn't like to put prices on his site, but if you email him, you should find he's got good prices for whatever amount of design you need.
You spend your time creating and learning and meeting interesting people instead of obsessing over unimportant details like business card designs. You meet someone. You want them to know they are personally important to you. You want them to be able to contact you.
Just take out the simple, elegant, paper notebook you habitually carry to record thoughts, names, lists, etc. Keep talking. Print your name and the way you would prefer to be contacted. Add the date. Hand the piece of paper to your "contact".
Immediately you have something beyond the trading of little uniform squares of bland cardboard.
That said, I don't think it's important that they're impressive early on. If we're going to impress people it's going to be with what we say, not with our cards. The card has one function: so that they still have our contact info when they get back to their office. I got the cheapest ones I could find (50 for €12) and spent all of about half an hour sorting that out.
Good design is important, especially for a website. If your business card is ugly, what is your site going to look like?
But exotic materials or obviously expensive printing techniques don't signal frugal, which ought to be an important quality in a startup founder.
Clean design is important, but impressing people with our design skills is less core for us than most news.YC readers since we're providing tools to integrate to other sites (at the data-level) rather than user-accessible components. We just need to look professional, not so much exciting.
Plus I think that having a design that makes a notable impression is possible, but to get above the run-of-the-mill nice looking cards, you're going to pay. That's fine if you're Guy Kawasaki. For us, I'm just hoping that the people that would remember me anyway remember me plus have my email address.
I couldn't tell you what any of the cards that I collected at my last outing looked like. I copied them into my address book at home, synched to my phone, connected to the folks on LinkedIn / Xing, and threw them in the recycling bin. :-)
Maybe I figure we're in a slightly different forum here. I'm under the impression most folks here are the creators, not the salespeople. Some cheap business cards simply printed might be useful for the latter, and I guess in some circumstances for the former too - but what your describe seems a little like leaving a flyer under somebody's windshield wipers in the parking lot.
But if hacker or engineer or physician or writer or anyone else who actually does the hard work pulls out some fancy-dancy-designed cards and seems to be all about "mixing" rather than building, I start to wonder.
I'm development, marketing, sales, investor relations, quality assurance, public relations, human resources, customer service and janitor. I suspect most people are in the same boat. ;-)