Business card and identity design for Open Communities, a group that consults on matters of diversity, integration, and community love. Here, the design is kept relatively straightforward, as it was a first run in part of a larger branding and marketing effort.

The ring icon is used to create a brand pattern on the reverse side.

Close-up of the ring. Unfortunately, these are printed in 4-colour process, so moiré patterns are visible. But it’s all good.

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.

I’m not actually sure why he’d need a business card, but it never hurts. I love the vintage typography, even on this cartoon card.

via FFFFound »

For Synergy Showroom, a fashion showroom in New York, I designed a card that is custom duplex, with two colours of Neenah Classic Crest (Solar White and Antique Grey). The crappy photos don’t show, the but grey logo side is metallic foil stamp of black, and the white side is simply offset.

Against one another, you see the difference in paper colour.

Printed by Alpine Creative Group in New York. Logo and card design by Starship Design.

Freelance graphic designer/art director PIM has a clever idea for how to prime the referral machine — have you business card multiply itself. A perforated line helps ripability.

Pretty self-explanatory, but with directions. Never hurts to walk people through a supposedly understood procedure.

The only problem I can spot — PIM is a stupid name. Is that initials? The name of a company? See, I’ve already thought about it too much.

The card from Anthem seems rather straightforward. It’s white, with black text. All good. I questioned why the back was nothing but an exclamation mark, and the folks from Anthem couldn’t give a solid answer.

But they did show me a clever use of the cards, taking the exclamation mark as a sort of manga-style emoticon. Useful when a flailing client is on the line, or when deadlines loom.

The cards belonging to the in-house team at Campbell’s Soup aren’t terribly thrilling. A logo, lots of white space, the bare necessities.

But I found it rather cute that they have a product photo on the back. Look at that jar, all bold and solitary. Good stuff.

That is all.

3D cards are a touchy subject — they can be clever, and they can easily go to far. I like this card from TAM Cargo, because it folds flat to serve as a conventional card. That way, if you have no patience to carry around a miniature shipping box in your wallet, you don’t have to.

Designed by Y&R São Paulo

via DirectDaily »

I was once scolded for producing a name-only card, where the recipient would have to Google my name in order to learn anything about me. Well, that effort seems frivolous compared to the challenge of assembling a puzzle to get a hold of the card.

I learned my lesson: people don’t want to exert effort when they receive your business card. Clearly, that lesson has yet to be learned here. The cards for Giuseppe Profilio are packaged in individual bags, which, if you ask me, seems wasteful.

Her first card is actually rather eye-catching — a $20 bill — to indicate that we get money to recommend her firm. Pretty straightforward, if you think about it. This brings up a point, though, about how US currency is actually a better bit of design than the card itself, but let’s not go there.

It does, after all, seem appropriate for a tip calculator chart to be included on the back of the card. Accountants are all about correct amounts. But let’s not bring up the abundance of tip-calculator applications on smart phones.

Sadly, her regular card is pretty sucky. Typical small business America, I suppose. Now I wonder if she’ll accept new business cards as payment for my tax return next year …

I enjoy the logo and typography for L’Arte del Gelato, a small gelato shop in New York’s Greenwich Village.

I cannot, however, endorse their choice of card size, which is nothing like a business card, but instead some almost-square contraption.

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.

If you have ‘wood’ in your name, it’s a great excuse to have a card made of wood.

Actually, this particular material would make for a nice card for anyone. I enjoy it. Cardsofwood.com, if you’re interested.

An electronics engineer whose business card is not only an actual circuit board, but it’s a USB thumb drive. Useful, yet bulky. I’m afraid this isn’t the first one of these I’ve seen, and thus, I’m not terribly impressed.

Bold, though, because this has to cost a pretty penny.

Today, the topic is business cards and titles.

… the business card is a rare analogue survivor in the digital age. One day our iPhones and BlackBerrys may be able to exchange details without us intervening, but until then a bit of cardboard is the best thing we have.

There are two points to a business card. One is to remind people who you are. The other is tell people how to get in touch with you.

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