The Art of Making an Awesome Business Card

In any networking event, you often present your namecard to the people you meet. Believe it or not, the design of a namecard can be vital for the other person to have a good impression of you. So, we are going to talk about the killer design for an awesome namecard.
Giving your namecard to someone can be seen as a way of presenting your personal brand to the person. Branding is not just making a card and give it. It is far more than that. It comes with the personality and the way how you interact with the people with that business card. Hence making a good business card is important. We have offered a few rules in designing a namecard and also the reasons for adopting these features:

• Simplicity in design matters from logos to fonts: Use a simple and clear font (Arial, Times New Roman) with a decent font size such that your name, designation, company address, contact numbers (mobile, fax and office numbers) and email address are clearly obvious on the namecard. Don’t try to cram too much information on the card.However, in China, most namecards have tons of information about the person and the company. If you think about it, the way they cram a lot of information on their websites (with the exceptiion of Baidu) are also translated into the design of their namecards.
• A white background is better than a black one: Do you notice that most big companies, be it the big investment banks (Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup), technology companies (Microsoft, Google, Apple and GSK) pick white color for the background of their corporate namecards? In fact, most big corporations don’t use black namecards. Do you know why this is so? There is a practical reason behind this. Experienced networking people will tend to write down something about the people they meet when they receive the namecard from that individual. They sketch some points about the person so that when they are doing their followup email to that individual, they can remind the other person who they are. A white background is ideal because you can write something there, but not a black one.
• A photo is a waste of space: Some people put their photos on the namecards, particularly the real estate agents, salesman and stockbrokers. For such professions, the picture on the namecards are mainly for identification. It is important to realize that putting a photo is not really a good idea because it takes up space on the card. Unless you have a lot of money to pay for a colour namecards, black and white passport photos will not be good for a namecard design.
• Easy to reproduce and for scanning: If you are a social butterfly, your namecard must be reproducible as quickly as possible. With the advance of technologies, it is also important that your namecard can be easily accessed by a namecard scanner into a *.vcf file.
• Too much colour spoil the broth: Don’t try to put too much colour into your card. If you need to put in colours pertaining to your organization, just pick one. For example, the National University of Singapore adopts orange for the upper half of the card and white for the other half. Branding for your namecard is important and hence your logo must be as simple as possible.

An example of a simple but professional student business card

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