Graphic
Design includes creating professional looking business cards.
The following is a short guide to assist in the decision making
process.
How to create
a professional business card
When
we meet another professional like ourselves or a potential customer,
we want them to have their own copy our card with our name,
title, mailing or address, phone numbers and emails. We will
lose our business like image, if we do not have a small clean
looking document to give them holding this basic yet critical
information. In this lesson, we will learn the basic skills
needed to design a tasteful and useful card that we will carry
throughout our career.
Before
beginning the business card project, sketch out a simple design.
In our illustration, we will need to decide what name, title,
addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, logos and taglines
we want to use. We need to determine whether this information
should be just on the front of the card or on both sides.
Some
cards contain a logo from our organization, so that solves the
image dilemma. Some individuals like to place a small sized
high-resolution picture of them on the document. If we decide
to use a random graphic, this image will essentially become
our logo after we distribute hundreds or even thousands of cards.
That illustration becomes a trademark of us, so we should chose
wisely when picking our business card image.
The
address on our 2 by 3.5 inch paper should be correct and we
should be at that location regularly to check for mail and packages
sent to us. Some cards have a neighborhood office address including
the main office location printed on the small rectangular paper.
The
phone number should be much more than a voice mail service,
but should be your actual phone or an administrative assistant
to take and give messages. For small home and family businesses,
we can train a family member to receive calls and act as our
agent. Then we can place their number on the card and we can
have our representative who knows our daily schedule give real
information to people inquiring about our schedule and services.
The
email address should contain our business web address whenever
possible, like the example jsmith@worldclasscad.com. For individuals
with Gmail, Yahoo and Aol accounts, make sure the web address
reflects our professional nature. We do not want a web address,
such as Deathman14@email.com when we try to portray a professional
image to the customer or potential employer.
For
personal cards, we use our legal name as the main text instead
of the organization name. In addition, every professional has
a title whether given by degree or position, so use the designation
earned or given to us on the card.
Taglines
are useful in giving that critical additional information to
the customer or potential employer. If we have won a prize for
our latest college report in a regional contest, we could have
a tagline of "2009 Award Winning Author". If our specialty
is in graphics, we can say on the card "Maker of Remarkable
Illustrations". We utilize taglines when people do not
know our specialties and the short phrase helps communicate
our strengths to them.
If
a tagline is not enough and we wish to promote a few of our
products, we can list them on the back of our card as shown
in figure 1.2.
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