elbowruminations | Graphic Design Trends, Tips and Reviews Graphic Design Trends, Tips and Reviews

Your business card. The most commonly used communication tool in your arsenal of promotional weapons? Your only chance to make a great first impression? Perhaps! However, if your only goal is to create maximum impact with a small space, you’re approaching this the wrong way. Save maximum impact for your next sales presentation, the business card design is all about simple professionalism and saying more with less.

So how do I design a nice business card you ask? Excellent question, let’s get started.

Make the Logo… Better

Resist the common urge to make the logo as big you as can. Keep it as the main visual element but don’t over do it. You will never improve your brand through physical size alone. It should be the only graphic element on your card and people won’t have problems seeing it at reasonable size. By denying this urge, you’ll be preserving your professional dignity and subtly displaying your marketing prowess.

In addition to paying close attention to sizing, ensure your logo displays clearly without any sign of stretching, pixelation, blurriness, or other factors that detract from a pristine appearance. Don’t substitute your logo with clip art, especially if it’s a real photo.

To get off on the right foot, use the right file format. If your logo was professionally designed and you are using a layout software program like InDesign or Publisher, always use an EPS file for your logo. If you are working in a Microsoft Word template, try asking your graphic designer to create your logo in a file format called WMF.

Moo.com is a great option too. They have tons of great looking templates and easy to use tools, but to get a good result, you’ll need to use an EPS file.

If you’ve exhausted your options and your logo remains blurry. It’s time to throw in the towel and hire a graphic designer.

Text Sells

Please choose your fonts wisely. Instead of getting creative with Comic Sans or Papyrus, keep your wits about you and a font from respectable family. If you are worried about choosing wisely, first try matching with a font that might be in your logo. If that font seems professional to you, and it should be if your logo uses it, stick to what you know.

If you can’t rely on your logo for guidance, Quicksand, Open Sans, and Museo, are all great free sans-serif choices. Or, if you need something more serious, why not try Afta, Calluna, or EB Garamond.

Remember, just use one font. Two fonts makes the quiet suggestion that you are trying too hard, more than two fonts screams un-professionalism. Keep your text small but not too small. 8 point type is usually perfect. Any larger and you are asking for a cluttered look that may cause people to be see right through your DIY handiwork.

Example of a bad business card

Example of a nice business card

Stack, Space, and Spare the details

Organization is key to a nice business card. Balanced information that lives in harmony with your logo and a good amount of white space, especially around the edges of the card, is the perfect recipe for success. Keep the details simple. Phone, e-mail, website, name and title are common components. Long URLs to your many social media profiles are not necessary. Unless you can make a printed Facebook icon clickable, leave it off.

Your marketing efforts should flow smoothly from your card to your website to a transaction. Leave people a trail to follow and provide pertinent information along the way. Your business card is a simple welcome mat to your business.

The less information you include, the more room for valuable white space that will help attract attention to your logo, make your information easier to read, and make the jump from home-made and visual excellence.

Proper Printing

The finishing touch is the paper you choose to print on. Avoid at home printing kits – nothing says cheap junk like perforated edges. Instead, drop by your neighbourhood print shop (this one’s in Texas) or an online printing service with your finished design and choose or a nice, thick stock. Don’t settle for something flimsy. The money you spend on quality printing will come back to you in profits once you start impressing people with your nice business cards.

Follow these simple guidelines and you’ll be in business in no time! If I’ve missed anything, let me know in the comments.

Give it some time and everything old will become new again.

I’m too young to remember the telegram but from what I’ve read, it’s a short concise message to someone far away. Telegram style is a way of writing that attempts to abbreviate words and pack as much information into the shortest possible number of words and or characters as possible.

Sound familiar?

Incidentally, you can still send telegrams if you have distant relatives that don’t respond to telephone calls, emails, fax or smoke signal.

Way back in 1886, some people were using the telephone and other people were trying to find a fair way to make those people pay for it. Angry diatribes printed in the newspapers were common, subscribers were up in arms over ridiculous fees and nobody could agree on whether usage based billing was justified.

Sound familiar?

Remember calling cards? You may have used them in college to keep long distance relationships intact or to call home from a European phone booth. Well, they’re back! And they are not only a solution for 25 cent a minute mobile long distance charges, they are a way to make a statement about your statement. In Canada, fair competition regulated by the CRTC, is an effort by the government to encourage competition and fair pricing in technology. However, Canadians are still paying some of the world’s highest cell phone bills.

Calling cards are a backwards way of saying yes to savings and no to outrageous fees.

Here’s how:

• Invest $20 in a 900 minute calling card.
• Download a free iphone app that remembers and auto-dials the access number and PIN. It even allows you to customize a timed response based on the voice prompts you receive when you dial in.
• Never pay carrier fees for long distance again!

Whether you’re in Canada or the U.S. this is an easy way to take advantage of history repeating itself.

The official logo of the London 2012 Olympic games is turning five next year. Like most growing children, this logo’s naturally developed affinity for trouble-making is the defining characteristic that we’ve come to love as proud global guardians of the Olympic identity.

The initial reports, post unveiling ceremony, were scathing and unkind. Blogs and their readers were quick to pan the logo and spew hate at Wolf Ollins, the agency involved in it’s creation. Elbowruminations was also on the scene back in 2007 covering the hype. Kevan defined the logo nicely with a simple equation: Inukshuk + 1989 = the logo.

With the Games quickly approach, has this $840,000 investment appreciated in value since it’s rocky introduction as an epileptic trigger and most recently, a zionist symbol and a sure sign of a pending alien invasion.

I am tempted to say yes.

Not because it’s nice but because it’s still horrible and horrible is what we want.

Remember 2007? It was boring and so were we. Entertainment was defined by the ipod clickwheel! The design inspiration for the year – 2007 was at the height full of swooshy istock swirls. Ack! Just look at us now. We don’t even press buttons anymore. Fashion has no rules. In fact, dressing up in old clothes with huge out-dated glasses is the height of hipster fashion.

If you ask me, as gaudy as the logo appeared five years ago, I think we’ll be ready for it. With Arab Spring in full swing and the “no reason riots” in Vancouver and England complete, people are tired of behaving properly and following boring rules.

As we have learned, violence causes unwanted destruction and pain – which is inconvenient. We need something less violent to break us out of this deep rut of political and economical dissatisfaction. What better way to express our discontent than through awful design. This logo does not conform to any laws. It remains physically unwilling to bend to any social norms. It’s belligerent, unashamed, narcissistic and itching for a screaming match with a person of authority.

It seems like that’s how we feel these days.

Which is why we have the perfect logo for London 2012.

Thank you, Wolf Ollins. You know us so well.