On Reddit, of all places, I spotted this card for Natalie Roberts. I found it efficient and somewhat clever how she lumps in all her contact info within her email address, even though it may not be an entirely original idea. I’ve often been faced with this, where people don’t realise that my website is the same as my email address (considering it’s my last name.com, not, say, Gmail).

However, I have to agree with the snarky commenters that this card’s bizarre shape is a bridge too far, and Natalie’s artistic merit gets a little lost on people who are fumbling around trying to fit it into their wallet.

This debate will rage on. I’m a big fan of cards that fit in plastic sleeves or in wallets. Anything bigger is unwieldy and usually gets folded or even tossed.

I spotted these very sharp cards from Nathalie Cone, design out of Baltimore.

Says Nathalie of the colours, “The fluorescent red ink straight out of the can was a little too bright and harsh for what I was looking for, so my printer taught me that mixing other “normal” inks with the fluorescent red (she used warm red, yellow, and white) was an easy way to tone down the ink without losing the fluorescent quality too much.”

I dig the edge staining, and the card is printed on 220# cotton stock, maybe Crane Lettra or something similar.

Images courtesy of Nathalie Cone

In spite of my poor photography skills, you should try your best to examine this gorgeous card from Bleu Sky Creative up in Vermont.

It’s a two-colour letterpress with rounded corners, but the impression isn’t too deep. I dig the engraving-style artwork and typography.

Check out this handmade business card for design studio Rama. Their work focuses on handmade bookbinding, which is reflected in the cards. Composed in 540gsm cardboard, covered with cloth binding and a 250gsm cardboard backing, they feature a hand stamp with the Rama logo.

The fronts will vary with different hand-drawn illustrations and goffering produced with wood fonts.

Submitted by Sergio. Don’t forget you can submit yours.

From Bavaria, Germany comes mediendesignwerk and their agency card.

These cards feature “look-alike-letterpress” and are printed on 600 gsm “Cotton” paperfactory “Gmund” with 2-color offset printing and strong blind embossing for the “M” pattern. Printed by Druckkultur Späthling

I dig this letterpress card from majorminor. Grey, Blue, and blind letterpress on what feels like Crane Lettra 200# or something similar. It’s nice to handle.

Cards are printed on 640 gsm stock, 100mm x 60mm. The typeface is Hoefler.

Obviously, this is a simple and elegant card. It works well as a carte-de-visite, but as a business card, I’d like to add a title or email address. Call me old-fashioned.

Check out this Utility Card from Grain, perfect for any occasion. Birthday, wedding, whatever, just circle it.

Again, this isn’t a business card, per se, but I can imagine this being likewise useful for someone who has wears multiple hats. Imagine a similar concept but with various job titles circled — art director, voiceover artist, stuntman. I mean, you could if you don’t mind stealing a good idea.

It’s like I always say, good artists borrow, great artists steal. I made that up.

via Swissmiss »

I try to avoid a straight re-post from stuff I find on the web, but this piece is just gorgeous. From our dear friends at Studio on Fire comes the card for Ackmann & Dickerson.

[We made] a custom duplex paper — 160lb Mohawk Loop Ivory Smooth pasted to French Construction Nightshift Blue 100C — a thick 260lbC card. Next we letterpress printed them with two colors on each side, silver and tonal navy inks on the blue side, then blue and gray inks on the ivory side. We printed a couple 8up forms to meet all the employee name versions needs and then die cut them with small inverted corners.

Wow.

via Beast Pieces »

I’m a fan on Studio on Fire, and they’ve helped me print some cards in the past. This is one of their self-promotional cards, illustrating, in this case, how they can die-cut into strange shapes, apply type in a circle, and press blind patterns. All very cool.

Even though I smirked at this, I’m still not a huge fan of ninja star business cards, as you know.

Last month, I collected my weight in business cards at the FUSE Conference in Chicago. Many of them were dull corporate nonsense, but the gold medal of exceptional cards went to the boys from Brooklyn-based Chapps Malina.

The card is black, made of some strange sort of suede-like, rubber-like finish. The text on the front seems to be gloss stamp, black-on-black.

And the back is silver ink letterpress. Very lusty indeed.

Here we have a case study in resourcefulness, as Erica Heinz, designer [and yoga teacher], uses engraved artwork of yesteryear for her present day business card. Old engravings and artwork from previous centuries are in the public domain, so are therefore free for folks to use. While a designer may be pressured to do all his/her own artwork, I don’t mind the recycling of key art like this.

This card is letterpressed, which is impressive that they could achieve such fine detail with letterpress. No idea on printing credits or paper stocks.

Craig Ward, the highly-decorated and highly talented typographer/designer, has worked in multiple countries, for numerous clients, for many years … without a business card. Finally taking the effort to design one, and have it printed, I am pleased to present his card.

A single-colour, letterpressed card, printed by Dave at Print Icon in New York City on 110# Mohawk paper. A first run of 500, which I imagine he’ll take some time to get rid of.

Craig works under the moniker Words Are Pictures.

Spotted this gorgeous example of a letterpressed card on the Dolce Press blog. While there is no shortage of excellent letterpressed business cards out there, this particular post is not only photos, but a bit of an explanation/tutorial on how to design for letterpress when you’re working with large fields of colour.

Close-up example of the text

edge-staining is a nice touch

More photos are available on Dolce’s Flickr feed »

If you’re a letterpress shop, you’d better have a sharp card. The above image is so very lightly pressed onto the card that you can barely feel it. The lines are extremely fine, some maybe as fine as 1/8″ pt. And the image doesn’t leave an impression the reverse side.

The reverse side isn’t much for layout — 5 typefaces? Really? — but the same technique applies. I’m definitely going to ask these folks to bid on my next letterpress job.