tabsk Business Card
WHAT MY BUSINESS CARD IS FOR
My business card is for my personal brand, tabsk. I offer custom lettering and logotype design, so my business card features my own hand-lettered logotype. :)
BUSINESS CARD REFERENCE IMAGES
I have a Pinterest board called Brand Identity & Logo Design where I pin all of my favourite business cards. I'm a big fan of rounded corners, die cuts, and painted edges. Here's a few of the cards I love most:
I especially admire the card that folds into a boquet -- it's for a marketing group but would be wonderful for a florist!
MY FAVOURITE JUKEBOX PRINT CARD
I just spotted this card on the jukeboxprint Instagram page. Some people complain about business cards that don't fit the standard shape or size, but these are unbelieveably cool! The elegant ribbon shape and champagne pink colour are wonderfully suited for an event planner. It looks like they're letterpressed too, which adds an extra thoughtful detail. So classy!
ROUGH CARD MOCKUPS
I designed my personal business cards with 40pt double-sided letterpress printing in mind on Jukebox's 2 ply Bright White Soft Cotton stock. These cards would also feature rounded corners with a coloured edge.
On the front side, the green would be letterpressed, allowing the white letters to pop up. On the back side, everything would be letterpressed, allowing the white in the social media icons to pop up. I received a quote from Jukebox Print for this method already, so I'm saving up my dollars!
For standard printing, this design would be printed on the 20pt Off-White Pulp business cards with rounded corners. If it's still possible to do the coloured edge, I'd happily pay extra for that. It's also something I might try painting myself at home for a handmade feel.
The two colours I use in my branding are based on PANTONE's Seedling (PANTONE 14- 0217) and Terra Cotta (PANTONE 16- 1526). Since the actual swatches for these colours aren't in the books that are included with Adobe CC, I'll have to buy them through PANTONE if I want the exact colours. For now, I'm using the closest CMYK equivalents that I snapped with ColorSnapper.
The font used is called Open Sans. It's the same font used for the body copy on my website!
REVISIONS FINAL BUSINESS CARD
Though the back side of my business card was clean, simple and made sense, I wasn't totally in love with the layout. So I worked through a few other iterations, as you can see below.
The design above has a little bit less information (I took out my email address) and focuses my name and URL.
This is my final design. I broke up the social media icons into two sections because I'm on seven networks (possibly too many!) and I think they might overwhelm the viewer when they're all grouped together. I also highlighted the "@tabsk" in my email address, because it's my handle on several of the social networks. I think this layout makes the back of the card a bit more visually interesting while still making sense.
I found this business card mockup over on Pixeden, and it really helped me visualize what my cards would look like with the coloured edges and if I had them letterpressed. The mockup doesn't have the rounded corners, but it's still really fun to see what the cards might look like printed anyways.
I did the entire design process in Illustrator and then placed .eps files of each side of the card in InDesign. I then exported a PDF from InDesign including the crop marks. This class came around at the perfect time for me. I'm so excited to have my business cards designed and ready to print!
Thank you very much for the class, Jon!