Branding

How to Design a Successful Business Card

metal-business-cardYour business card says a great deal about you and your company. It makes a crucial first impression on your potential customers, so you need to make sure that impression is a good one. If you’ve successfully done all the painstaking groundwork which goes into winning a new contact, the last thing you want is for all your good work to be undone if the quality of your business card printing lets you down.

Here is some expert advice on how to come up with the best business card design for your company:

  • Before you can even think about printing you have to start with a design. Unless this is your particular area of expertise, it is generally advisable to engage the services of a professional graphic designer. It might not come cheap but it is a one off expense and a very worthwhile one when you consider the importance to your image and reputation. Your designer can translate the essence and personality of your company into the design of your business cards, and their skills will prove useful in other areas too, as you’ll discover when you read on.
  • Use a professional printing service. Thanks to the ready availability of software you can use at home, designing and printing your own business cards has become very easy and cheap to do these days. However, the inferior quality is impossible to conceal and won’t do anything to gain you favour or credibility in the eyes of your new contacts.
  • Choose a colour scheme that is consistent with your social media profiles and other business stationery in order to project a professional image. It often helps to use a single designer to create all of these elements for a consistent and coherent look.
  • Don’t make your logo too large or you will reduce the space available on your cards for text. Work with your designer to come up with a good balance of the two.
  • Any good printing company will tell you that it’s absolutely vital your text is clear, so take their advice on font and size. Your contacts don’t want to have to get out a magnifying glass to read your contact details!
  • Select the information you want to include carefully-you want to inform people without making your card appear cluttered. Your logo will give your company name and you must of course include your own name, phone number and email. Beyond that you need to decide what information is important – for example, website, office address, fax number or links to social media profiles are all details you might wish to incorporate.
  • Use standard size cards. You might catch someone’s attention with an unusual shape or size of card, but if they can’t easily pop it in their card holder, you could just as easily lose their interest.
  • Take care with borders. Though today’s digital printing processes are highly sophisticated, there is a very small margin of error in the cutting process, so it’s best to avoid borders as these can very occasionally be cut unevenly. Using an experienced designer and printing company will, of course, help you reduce the risk of such problems.
  • For extra impact you could go for an embossed or metallic logo to really make your card stand out from the rest.\
  • It can be tempting to include additional information on the reverse side of your card, but we’d recommend keeping it blank. That way, new contacts can use the space to jot notes about when they’ve agreed to get in touch or anything they’ve promised to do for you.

Good luck!

If you have any questions, please ask below!