What makes a good design for a business card?

As a designer, I often see business cards being sent to our presses for print that really make me want to pick them up and read them. Others, I just wonder what they were thinking when they designed them…

Quite often the worst ones will have so much text and information on them that you wonder why they weren’t A4 in size? This coupled with their name in 18 point Arial, and the bit they completely forgot to put on after 60 hours in front of ‘publisher’ or ‘word’ in 2 point type.

Maybe its just me, but people are very proud of their designs (as I am sometimes..when I’m allowed). No matter what you advise them, they still want to put their own touch on things. I appreciate their need, but do other people?.

Often at work, I’m asked to put information into giant yellow stars. To me, it looks like it should be in a greengrocers window and not on a piece of print. Marketing departments rightly or wrongly assume that people are stupid and blind, and the only way to get them to focus their attention on your message is to ram it down their throats…. don’t know about you but I like to chew my food before I eat it.

Then again, strangely, if everyone designed perfect business cards, none would stand out from the crowd as ‘original or special’ and technically they’d all be boring .. you can’t win em all can you?

Tags: business cards, print design, publisher, word

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