There’s been a link floating around the web to a collection of cool business cards Seeing it made me bummed I hadn’t posted a story about my own yet, so here I go. Not that I think it’s as clever as any in the collection at CreativeBits, but it does do something that, surprisingly, none of the others do. I made my face part of the design.
I went several months after starting the business without a business card. While it’s easier these days to get by without one—any web developer worth half his salt should be instantly Googleable—it does become an issue when someone asks for your email address or website and the best you can do is tear out a blank corner from the Reader and scribble it out on that. Or worse, ask for one of their business cards and write your info on the back. Baaad form.
But then the trip to SXSW appeared on the horizon, and I knew business cards there would be essential. It’s a form of social currency there to measure how stuffed with cards your ID badge is, and I didn’t want to be one of those guys who only received, without something back to give.
I wanted to do something clever with mine, but without sacrificing functionality. I found a useful list online by the Scobleizer, where he lays out eleven elements of good business card design. While I don’t think the eleven would all work together in one card, there was certainly one or there two to build a design on. The one I found especially compelling: number eight. “Put your picture on it.”
There’s one distinct subset of the population that’s famous for putting their pictures on their cards, and while I have some measure of respect for Realtors, I certainly did not want to be mistaken for one. If I was going to have my likeness on my card, it was going to have to be many steps away from a Sears Portrait Studio shot.
My first inspiration came from a slick illustration that Sam had done of himself. I loved the two-bit look. I fired up iPhoto and Illustrator and went to work. I found the perfect photo rather quickly. It was a shot, from my wedding, of me talking on the phone in the hours before the event started. I liked the way I was looking off camera. The only problem was that when I converted it to a line drawing (involving a confusing array of Photoshop filters and Illustrator tricks that I won’t go into now), you could still tell I was on the phone. Here’s the before and after. Notice how I made myself ever so slightly more smiley.
Erasing my arm and hand was no problem. It was the reconstructive surgery on my face that had me stymied. No Illustrator whiz am I. I dug back in and hunted around for something that I could patch in. The best I found was a shot of me in roughly the same position, but looking the other way. It was close enough that a little flip and reshaping and I was able to put together a vectored FrankenSandy.
After deliberating about the type treatment way too much, involving several design-wise friends all who gave me differing opinions, and pushing myself to the edge of the printing deadline, I was ready to head to the printer. And this was the best part, and the biggest reason I went for a two-color design: I was getting these babies letterpressed. As a birthday/new business gift back in the fall, Sarah had given me a gift certificate for 500 letterpressed business cards, to be done by our friend Stacey Stern, of Steracle Press, who did all the letterpress work for our wedding invitations. I picked the paper, sent her the file, and a week later, one day before heading to Austin, I picked them up. They were as great as I’d hoped.
I know the average lifetime of a business card is something less than a day. If you just count the time it’s actually looked at, we’re probably talking seconds. My hope, in designing it this way, in making it stand out a little bit more, was for those seconds to become a minute or two. If it captured someone’s eye, either at the conference, or at her desk the week after, as she was sorting through her collection and entering them into an address book, and made her remember meeting me and maybe encouraged her to visit my site and, who knows, bookmark it, then the card’s done its job.
I’ve handed out several hundred so far. Almost every time I do, it gets a second glance and brings a smile to the person’s face. Usually I get an “Ooh, that’s interesting.” Once in a while I’m asked about the letterpressing, which usually leads into a short discussion about the project. Whether any of these piques of interest have directly resulted in new work is hard to say. But if it hasn’t happened yet, I’m confident it will one day.