The slow death of the traditional business card

I ended up working in print, or I guess print-adjacent, right after the book came out. This scene nails the time period, business cards were experimented with in terms of weight (the thickness), being able to put watermarks on them more easily, and so on. Once that opened up, a period of competition happened and it was just as ... petty and fraught as that scene, as Bateman more or less holds himself together against forces of internal dissolution as both his taste goes unacknowledged and he is effortlessly one-upped by Paul Allen, again, who isn't even in the room.

Source https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T4UQf7zb3Pk

Notice that "acquisitions" is misspelled on each card!

There's a great analysis of that scene on YT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKc54z5SsEs

Came here for that. Business cards are reduced to this scene now.

Can’t forget this classic: https://youtu.be/4YBxeDN4tbk

applied to other white colored product: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/624/593/ac4...

Man, now I really want a reservation at Dorsia. Gonna listen to some Huey Lewis on my way home.

I finally managed to get my last name as a domain name. My calling cards are all letterpress (reverse embossing) and read "{first_name}@{last-name}.com". The twist is that first name and last name are black, the "@" and ".com" are struck blind (no ink). The result is a card that just has my name on it at first glance, but when you look at it you realize it's an email address.

That's it. No phone, nothing else.

yep. They are perfect. Then if they decide not to contact it isn't weird, it's very easy to say they lost it. Then we can all skip the weird ritual of adding each other to our phones so we can not call each other.

I do the same thing, and second the Moo.com recommendation. I splurged and got the tri-layer card for mine.

Great link, thanks.

I was actually talking to a guy from the late 1800s the other day at a dinner party, and he simply couldn't believe that we spend all our days (including early morning!) on "calls" with co-workers, but never have a set day and time set aside for social calls. Truly, we lost something.

Does it say:

sharing good books, good food and exotic music and dance

tender embraces

unusual sense of humor

Agreed. When your job requires you to meet new people often or do trade shows, business cards with a qr code are the way to go. At one trade show I collected about 80 cards. About 10 people had special app vcards. Each with a totally different app. I'm not downloading an app for your information. Give me the fucking piece of paper.

However, pro tip. Blank back cards. People want to write notes about you and vice versa. Stop over designing cards with a back. A typical card is not a flyer. You should only hand them out to people you've met and talked to. That same card will fail as that hybrid business card/flyer. You'll never have enough info to justify expecting someone to go "huh, I just found this card somewhere without context and suddenly I'm compelled to talk to them".

I used to have the opposite problem. supposed to carry around your cards everywhere? instant notecards. bored in a meeting? make a little maquette.

Save them for your kids so you can tell them about the wacky things we did in the olden days.

For me my cards primary use is allowing me not to have to bother to memorize my work phone number.

Either I give the card to someone so they have my number, or I always have a few at hand so I can read my number off to them.

Ha, I also once had a job which just gave me, without being asked, a box of business cards I never even opened. I just assumed that kickbacks from a printing company to a VP somewhere were responsible.

Yeah....I've always had business cards for a long, long, long time ago. Always got 1,000 cards, but I'd work somewhere for 5 years and still have 995 cards left at the end. Meanwhile that huge brick took up valuable disk drawer real estate. Guess I could have thrown all of them but 50 cards away, but most people just don't for whatever reason.

I have a whole box of boxes of 1000 business cards. I never use more than a handful.

With both hands, of course.

After the meeting, what do you do with the ones you received?

> but it does beat handing someone a post-it note with my email on it

When does this ever come up? I have never once in my life ever felt the need to copy down a printed email, url, or phone number. If you're a company rep, you have a website I'll just Google, if you're a person you have social media or I just hand you my phone to enter your phone number.

To your point, yes they are easy to dismiss. Until that one time you bump into someone of substance and don't have anything to hand them.

Biz cards are now a differentiator. For the cost, they're a no brainer.

If you're in sales, you always take them, put them into your CRM, and immediately contact them.

An implanted chip made by a company called "Dangerous Things" who's address is a box at a UPS Store disguised as a "suite" and whose website has no privacy policy or even TOS. Dangerous things, indeed.

Some of them can be rewritten. If you can read it through the skin, you can rewrite the data through the skin. No idea how many times, but presumably enough to keep your name/title/email/phone up-to-date.

Yes, overkill. But it makes headlines.

I was at my first post-Covid sales conference a couple of months ago and this is the only way that contacts was shared.

I've been thinking about getting a QR code sticker that I can stick to my phone that has my LinkedIn url for easy adding.

I never log into LinkedIn on my phone, and I would never in a million years install their app — OTOH it’s easy enough to type in a LinkedIn URL when I get to my home computer and an isolated browser instance.

> By the time I came back to my apartment it'd look like I just came back from a meet and greet at a strip club.

In Shanghai they would shove cards advertising prostitutes under the door of your apartment. You can't reject the card that way!

(That practice may have lessened now, with prostitutes advertising more directly over wechat. I'm not sure.)

Those were cards for brothels, not strip clubs

man I'd be super careful being handed anything in Colombia. Scopolamine is a real danger down there.

Reads like an introvert's dream:

> The essential convention was that a first person would not expect to see a second person in the second's own home (unless invited or introduced) without having first left his visiting card at the second's home. Upon leaving the card, the first would not expect to be admitted initially but instead might receive a card at his own home in response from the second. This would serve as a signal that a personal visit and meeting at home would be welcome. On the other hand, if no card was forthcoming, or if a card was sent in an envelope, a personal visit was thereby discouraged.

and also:

> Sample lady's visiting card, specifying an "At Home" day

> The "At Home" day was a social custom in Victorian Britain, where women of gentle status would receive visitors on a specific day of the week.

They're great for conferences and events. I don't try to do anything crazy or whimsical either. Utility over novelty.

moo.com, mentioned a few times here, has decent prices and good options.

Those were neat. I remember getting some piece of little software that came on one (pretty sure it was a driver for something).