GeekStack is recruiting playtesters for our online trading card game with a science and technology theme. If you're interested, sign up here. Thanks!
Quick and Easy Do-It-Yourself Business Cards
Posted on | November 6, 2008 | No Comments
Now that I have my logo, I wanted to get business cards. Tech entrepreneurs often sneer at business cards as a crutch for people whose product doesn’t sell itself, but since I’m making a physical, consumer product, there’s more to do and more people that will need to be on board. If I want them to help me, they need to know me, so I’ve found some networking events and business forums here in Chicago that I’ll go to and hopefully meet people who I can team up with.
Justifications aside, here’s how I made my business cards. I went to Searchyc because pretty much every startup-related question has been asked and answered well on Hacker News. I looked up business cards found a couple useful posts about business card design, including this one by Seth Godin.
Based on those and other tips, I came up with the following criteria for how I wanted my cards to look:
- I liked the idea of a black background…
- but I wanted to leave some white space for people to write notes on
- I want to push the logo and create some brand familiarity there, since that’s all I have to show so far
- I wanted my url, email, and name, and as little else as possible
- I didn’t want only black and white, but I’m not ready to deal with colors yet
After a few experiments, here’s what I came up with:
(the back is the same size but the bottom 1/4 is white to leave some space for people to write notes)
I also learned two things from these two discussions about printing companies:
- Two companies are head and shoulders above the rest: overnightprints.com and Vista Print.
- Overnightprints is a little more expensive but has better print and paper quality
Done and done. I went to the overnightprints web site and followed the directions there. They have a nice walkthrough about common mistakes people make and they have a preview page where you can see how they will print. Some tips:
- Images must be 1088×638 pixels
- Images must be 300dpi
- Leave some padding (their preview page shows you how much) around the edge so your text or images don’t get cut off
Pretty easy, and it was only $19 for 100 double sided, glossy cards with rounded corners, priority printing, and UPS Ground (thanks for the coupon, retailmenot!). I ordered them on a Friday and got them the next Wednesday which was great.
There were only two issues I had with the cards when they came. First, the contrast between the gray contact info and the black background was a lot less on paper than it was on the screen. I’ll chalk that one up to my inexperience with print vs screen characteristics. It’s not that the printing was dull – the black is very deep and bright. I just need to use a lighter gray next time. The other issue was that the trim buffer made my white writing area much smaller than I hoped and messed up the vertical balance of the top part of the back. But I can correct for both of these issues by tweaking my images before my next order. I would definintely recommend OvernightPrints and I plan on using them again.
So there you go. Simple (about 1.5 hours to make the images and order), inexpensive (<$20), and fast (3 business day turnaround). Now I just have to get them in the right hands!
Delicious
Comments
Leave a Reply
