My New Business Card

It’s a shame that it’s taken the number 9 being added to the end of my calender to kick me into some proactive action with regards to self promotion. After a busy year in 2008 I think I started to let things slide. However No. 1 on my new years goal list is to get my promotional material designed, printed and sent out into the world.

The first of these are my business cards. These can be an extreme medium. It’s far too easy to undervalue them (and sometimes easy to overvalue them as in my previous post Trumpet Psycho).

Your card is a physical link to the people you’d like to work with and it’s an extension of yourself. So you have to decide if handing out free cards with “Happy Larry’s Print Shop” stamped all over them is really the message that you want to send about you and your profession

Get a nice card, use it at the right time and you’ll get the call.

As your business card is a reflection of you it’s worth spending time picking out a font and colour scheme that projects the image you’re after. Being careful not repeat what I’ve written in my previous post The Big Guns, I’d advise that if you know someone who can translate the swirling genius in your minds eye onto a jpeg then you ask for their help. Cue Ashley Morgan.

As an extension to this idea I’ve decided to try and bring all my promotional gear, from my blog to cards, flyers, CV’s, and even letter heads all together. Here is my new design. This is the front of my double sided card, my contact and site details being on the reverse:

As you can tell from the colour scheme I’m trying to keep everything nice and simple so my brand is easily identifiable. This is an advantage because it means that it’s readily transferable to my other mediums. If you are on a mac you may have already noticed that my favicon (the little picture that sits by your website name) has already been changed to my new “M” (I don’t know if you can see this on PC’s).

Soon enough I’ll update my site to feature this new motif as well and of course it’ll be featured on the rest of my material in varying forms. It looks great on my CV so I’ll put that up in the future for you to see.

The only problem that I have now is to find a decent printer to produce my material. It seems trickier than I first expected but I’ll make sure to link my results from my site to point you in the right direction.

If you have a business card that makes you proud please feel free to link it in the comments bellow, they’d be great to see. Also if you have had any positive experiences with printers I’d appreciate any information either by comment or email to matt@37.9.62.138