Business Cards

Design Notes

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I have designed business cards for professionals before, but have never created a professional business card for myself.  In my deliberation, I decided that I need to think outside of the norms and traditional design that I am used to when creating business cards for professional organizations.  I wanted to design a card that not only demonstrated my professional abilities, I wanted to create a design the showed my personality in a print medium, while maintaining a sense of humility.  That is to say, I didn't want to be vain, but I still wanted to establish that I am accomplished, confident, and approachable.  I chose to convey those traits through a professional portrait that was taken of me and then I stenciled the portrait in Photoshop as a starting point.  

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Design and Development

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As for color schemes, I went with professional, desaturated monochromatic variants of blue.  Since my eyes are blue, I used the opportunity to match my eyes with the color scheme.  Working according to the "rule of thirds", I divided up the front of my business card with two horizontal lines and two vertical lines spaced apart evenly on the canvas.  The elements that I wanted to attract viewers to are placed on the intersections of my four imaginary lines. 

 

For example, my eyes are 2/3 of the way up from the bottom and 1/3 of the way in from the left side.  The lines that border my name are also roughly placed on the intersections of two horizontal and two vertical lines.

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I added the text keeping simplicity in mind.  Originally, I only had my name and professional skills labeled, but for the sake of balancing the added titles, I placed some more information about me above my name.  When considering how to balance information about me, I debated whether or not to add military service and academic information about me.  At first, I chose veteran and scholar, but needed a title to balance instructional technologist.  So, I went with Iraq campaign veteran, as although I have never really thought about whether or not I would ever add such a title to a personal business card, the title balanced instructional technologist well.

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I divided the back into four segments, the last segment having the most contrast, as it contains the information that I feel is most important, my contact information.  Then, in each of the remaining three sections, I addressed the information from the front of the card more comprehensively. Just as the colors contrast, the information on the front and back contrast in extent.  

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