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Ohhh you are so helpful Gillows

Thank you!

xx

I can only advise you NOT to try designing your own card from scratch, unless you have a reasonable amount of serious design training. It's harder than it seems to come up with something that looks professional, and the fact that you're working in limited space only makes it harder.

Assuming you're not a trained designer, you'll have more than enough work cut out for you trawling through the various printers. (Google "business cards" and you'll have loads to choose from.) You'll need to browse through their templates and also consider what they offer for what price, and you'll probably have to end up compromising somewhere.

Before you start shopping for business stationery, it's vital to decide the sort of feel they should have. What's your approach, and what's your personality? I think you mentioned in an earlier thread that you go for the strictly scientific approach, "demonstration of the powers of a properly trained human brain". In which case your cards should give this sort of feel. A symbolic head or brain might be good, or something with a scientific feel like gridwork or graph lines.

You should like the design -- which helps ensure it matches your personality -- but never choose a design just because you like it. It's your branding, and giving off the right message comes first.

For instance, I've recently taken the plunge and ordered some cards from Vistaprint. But I wanted something rather spooky and mysterious, so eventually decided on this design of swirling smoke. It suits me, but wouldn't work at all well for your scientific style.

Note the large amount of information that can be put on this card. It's much too much. I only have three lines on mine (a large nom de guerre, and a smaller real name and e-mail address) -- because, not being a pro, I don't want to give out a phone number.

It took me days to settle on this design, and an afternoon to get the text exactly right. I changed the typeface to a script, changed the sizes, and moved everything around against the smoke background.

Dai Vernon's calling card just has his name and the word 'magician' in small letters under it. And that was all. No address, no phone number, obviously no e-mail or website, and certainly NO rabbits, cards, and the like, complete with an alphabet-soup of meaningless (to most of the public) initials.

That may be paring it down a bit much.

But if you are handing out your cards,and claim to be a magician, then you should do something magical with the card, or the card should do something.[/list]

^ Good advice from Robbie. But there's no harm in playing around and taking your roughed out ideas to a professional for a good polish. I do a bit of design and even a scratchy drawing on the back of a napkin is helpful.

@ Eshly, if you didn't know about Inkscape, there's a chance you don't know about the Gimp either.

http://www.gimp.org/

It's a bitmap manipulation program similar to photoshop but totally free. Between those two bits of software, you have the basic tools to create just about anything regarding digital images. Fun to play with even if you don't use them for your card project.

gillows wrote:@ Eshly, if you didn't know about Inkscape, there's a chance you don't know about the Gimp either.

I prefer the brother, Gimpshop. Basically all the workings of Gimp but laid out like they would be in Photoshop...

Moo business card.
I have 1950's pin up girls on the front holding cards and blue back bicycle on the rear. I would have put red backs, but that would have made me a weirdo.

(oh and of course the card she is holding is a fawce )

Just to clarify, I do have a certain amount of design training, and I still found it much simpler and quicker to go for a ready-made template.

The template I chose was a slight compromise on the ideal I had in mind, but the result was probably better overall than what I could have done using my own resources. And much cheaper, especially when you factor in the amount of time spent.

you've got nothing to lose by picking someone whose cards you like and copying them.

Don't forget about the back side too.

I'd agree with those who say leave the back side blank -- and leave it white and unvarnished too. There's SO much you can do with the blank side of a business card.

I had some fun putting together potential ideas to take to printers and see what could be done.

http://i50.tinypic.com/2lsd3ev.jpg

http://i45.tinypic.com/1zqqccz.jpg

http://i48.tinypic.com/dxnz1f.jpg

http://i48.tinypic.com/2d13bcl.jpg

http://i46.tinypic.com/2mdjf69.jpg

all done with Gimp.