Oct 5, 2006
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.
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10 Comments, Comment or Ping
uzyn
Check out Woz’ business card:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=200033851208
http://www.luckow.com/clients/woz/images/WOZMetalProof1.jpg
Sexy.
Oct 5th, 2006
Genkisan
Adopting the above rules will also save people with namecard scanner some time~
The scanning of “hip” namecards can prove fustrating.
Oct 5th, 2006
sunilsaysyes100
What do you think about the thought of replacing physical namecards with electronic ones ?
Ones which u can transfer from person to person .. within seconds .. using devices …
what will be the pros and cons of that product ?
Oct 5th, 2006
wannapreneur
sunilsaysyes100 : I would think the drawbacks would be along the lines of a little due to privacy and mostly sincerity/tradition ? Its perhaps the same reasoning as why most people still sent greeting cards through mail though you could definitely more easily zap tons of e-cards via email.
Oct 5th, 2006
Kenneth Wong
I tend to disagree with the photo on the namecard being a waste of space. In fact, I will think it is highly useful. When you have a stack of over 1,000 cards and say you do your marketing rounds daily ( esp in a place like China), you do tend to forget faces and names ( esp if the names are in Chinese or some may have generically similar English names e.g Alan, John). A face imho will be a useful form of immediate recognition. Several of the most high-ranking people I know have their faces on the cards (e.g the boss of the suzhou industrial park)
Also I think a business card has two sides, maybe the thing is in utilising all the space on the card?
Oct 6th, 2006
boon
Erm.. the headline is better than the article.
I find most of the articles on this blog too short, and don’t expand on the interesting points they bring up. Were they written too hastily?
Oct 6th, 2006
BL
Boon,
Well, the feedback we used to get is that we write too long articles, and hence we try to write within 600-1200 words for each article. In any case, we also let the readers respond with some additional points so that they can cover what we miss out.
We will see what we can do to expand the article a bit more.
Oct 6th, 2006
BL
Ken,
You have gotten a point there. We can include civil servants now as another one. However, you should see some cards that I get from real estate agents. Then you will understand why I gave that comment about “wasting space”.
Oct 6th, 2006
Andrew Wee
Hi BL,
interesting article.
I’d like to add that there’s a growing digital divide between old line and new line companies.
I find it’s imperative to add an email address and a website/blog address to my business cards, especially since i’m positioning myself as a blogger/affiliate marketer.
furthermore, i’d say including your MSN and Skype IDs facilitate communication as well (but people keep sending email to my hotmail account which I hardly check!)
I don’t have a fax number on my card and old line companies ask, how can i fax it to you?
me: don’t have a fax. can you email it to me?
them: no, only hard copy
me: can you scan to PDF and email me?
them: huh? what’s scan? what PDF?
me: ugh!!!!
—
My other pet peeve: using a gmail, yahoo, hotmail address on a business card.
it’s fine for your hobby dog grooming website, or kite flying blog.
but c’mon…. if you’re a $5m service company and your management can’t spend $50 a year for a domain and email hosting….
double ugh!!!!!
Andrew Wee
http://www.WhoIsAndrewWee.com
Oct 8th, 2006
hkloo
Hi BL,
Some points you mentioned are valid. Some are not. I do design business, so I would like to share my thoughts.
1. Simplicity - yes. But, the font you mentioned, not really applicable. The industry standard is to use Helvetica. It has a wide range of variant, thus easy to adapt.
2. colors - you should not worry about colors because most printers charge the same price now. Gone were the days when you are charged by 2 colors etc. These are old, digital printers.
3. photos - I must say I disagree with your point here. Certain industries need to have photo, because it adds credibility and trust. Insurance agent, school tutors, property agent etc, photo is a must. I have a customer running tuition centre and he has photo on his namecard. His customer feedback to him saying “You dare to put photos on your namecard, you must be good.” See the impact?
I have to add a few more points here
1. Get a pro/designer to do it for you. There are reasons why certain card are designed that way.
2. Get your logo done 1st before doing namecard.
3. Print offset with lamination whenever possible. The color is more lasting, card is better quality and it gives a very professional image.
4. Get a domain nane and website. It enhance your overall image. A namecard without email & website nowadays, it’s like a namecard without phone number. Email is catching up as the main communication channel.
5. Ask your designer to give you the design file in PDF format. Then it is easy for you to ask any printer to reprint.
6. Be creative. Use odd size, die cut, emboss, daring fonts etc. It is important to make a strong impression.
You can check out some of our work here http://www.netsarius.com/namecard-design.html We explain the process of re-designing a namecard.
Mar 14th, 2008
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