Designing My Personal Business Card

Sep 24, 2013
Sep242013

Designing My Personal Business Card

Before heading to #THATconference, I prepared a small set of business cards to help with networking. Thankfully, I have a lot of design-conscious friends and could use them to test and critique the numerous revisions that my personal card went through. I thought I'd share part of that design process.

I wanted a card that would say who I am, specify a few methods of contact, and be clean and simple. This is the initial idea that came to me:

001

Essentially, it's a combination of four things: my name (front and center), my email address (the entire text), my web address (part of the email), and my twitter handle (the part in twitter-blue). After getting some feedback from my "focus group", people didn't realize it was "twitter-blue". I thought a legend might help:

002

Nope, that's kind of awkward and feels out of place with the rest of the design. Dropped! I'll deal with that issue later. I'll focus on emphasizing the various parts. Here I put the web address in bold to distinguish it from the email address:

003

And then put my name in italics to help that stand out:

004

And then I decided it was ugly. Back to base!

Let's expand our design into its parts again:

005

Alright, what if I combine them, but just say what they are on the card?

006

Well, that's not terrible. Time to refine:

007

The dots span the length of the component they're describing. I decided to not include "email" because its format is a "universal truth" and doesn't need a description. I put my name in color to help it stand out since, you know, this card's for me.

008

Tweaking the weight and color:

009

Dropped the color from my name; it was blending into the "helper text".

010

Trying a color variation:

011

Multiple variations:

012

I ended up sticking with the original color scheme. While my focus group" was all over the place with what color scheme they liked the best, I felt the cyan had the best color balance and presentation on the card

A constant suggestion I was getting was that I really should included my phone number. Not everyone wants to communicate digitally, so having an option for a voice-to-voice combination opens up the channels. The first implementation of that wasn't pretty, though:

013

That design was losing the focus I set out with, to be simple and clean while presenting a decent amount of information. I switched back to the old layout and then put a bar at the bottom to contain the added info; also, since I wanted this to be a secondary form of a contact, I added some "cutesy" text:

014

Trying out a centered alignment:

015

Lots of dislike from the focus group on the font selection, trying something more traditional:

016

And now we're in business! Lots of good feedback on the design, and I was pretty happy with how it looked. All of my initial goals were achieved as well as the added bonus of having a phone number on the card. Time to create a prototype:

017

Excellent! Off to the presses!

In usage (at #THATconference), I got a lot of good feedback on the card: clever, clean, unique, different. Sadly, I have no way of tracking whether someone used that as an entry point to contact me, but at the very least it promotes me as having a brand.

Thanks again to everyone that helped by being my focus group; your feedback was much appreciated and helpful.