Business Cards

Business cards. Everyone loves a good business card. Having one determines whether or not it gets tossed at the end of the day. Either way, it’s importance cannot be denied, and that only magnifies the importance of finding someone who can help make sure that your business card is impressive, informative, and lastly innovative.

Thanks to printernational, the basics of the technical side of business card design are covered (quite thoroughly, might I add.) Then again, your business card designer should know the things listed there, anyway. What information your card should contain, however, is a different story.

Addresses: In the era of the online business, it becomes less and less important to list your physical address on your business card. Why? What if someone needs to mail something to me? Well, that’s one of the things that must be considered. If your business is the type that - at one point in time or another - will require someone to contact you via your physical mailing address as opposed to e-mail or telephone, then include it. Otherwise, ditch it and give your designer more white space to play with.

E-Mail Addresses: This one is practically mandatory. Why does the price of stamps keep going up? Because people are using e-mail the way they used to use snail mail - if it’s not a package, it’s being e-mailed. Even our bills are being sent to our e-mail addresses nowadays. Believe it or not, it’s practically expected that if you run a business, your e-mail address will contain your business’ name in the e-mail address (i.e. you@yourbusinessname.com, kendall@hypeimd.com, so on and so forth.) It’s all in the presentation.

Phone Number: No question. For purposes of customer service, if someone needs to get in touch with you, it should be readily available on your card. That is, if they don’t go and google you first.

Job Title: No one’s saying that a job title should be left off the card. However, if you’ve just created this fantastic company and you want to share this fact with everyone… show some humility in your approach. Calling yourself the “Grand Almighty Supreme Ultimate CEO, COO, CFO, CID, et. al” is too much. “Owner,” “Lead Director,” “President,” are all sufficient. Just to avoid ambiguity, try to avoid acronyms. You may still be wondering what a “CID” is. We’re not telling.

The long and short of it is this: seeing as how business cards are easily one of the most effective forms of targeted marketing, you have to make it count. Communicate with your designer, emphasize the priority level of certain items over others, and give them free range to execute what they think might be best for your design. You do trust your graphic designer with that, right?