Wade Armstrong: Giving Good Business Card

Giving Good Business Card

Posted Monday May 14, 2007 in Business

I’ve been buying business cards for my new employees lately, giving me a lot of time to think about what exactly makes a good business card. Business cards are surprisingly important business tools, but many of the cards that you’ll see out there today are surprisingly bad at being useful tools. Many boring, traditional cards are actually much better at being business cards than are beautiful, clever, cutting-edge pieces.

What are business cards actually for?

Most collateral pieces — brochures, pamphlets, CD-ROMs, etc. — are designed to be used in controlled situations, such as pitch sessions or meetings. Business cards are designed to be used in a variety of predictable and unpredictable situations — at that sales meeting, but also when you meet someone interesting in line at Starbucks, or even six months later, when that person you met at the conference finally needs your services. Business cards aren’t always active sales tools, they’re sometimes reminders, references, or identifiers.

So who actually uses business cards?

And that brings us to one of the things that most distinguishes business cards from other collateral: their user. First, think about your company’s brochure: who’s the real user of that brochure? You are, because you put that brochure out there into more-or-less controlled environments, generally some type of predictable sales activity to some fairly predictable customer or potential customer, to send a specific message.¹ Your potential customer may feel like they’re in charge of the sale, because they’re speccing out the needed product and making the purchase, but if your sales and marketing activities are right, you’re either in control or have a chance to be in control. You’re the user of the collateral.

But the business card has the opposite user — it’s the recipient of the card who uses it. Who knows under what circumstance they got your card,² but they’ll use that card to contact you at the time and place they find relevant. That means that your card needs to meet their needs at some nonspecific time in the future, under some nonspecific circumstances. Such a requirement demands exceptional flexibility.

How are business cards used?

Three things happen during the life of a business card:

They’re received by the end user
They’re stored by the end user
They’re retrieved by the end user, and used to contact you

Your business card needs to support all three.

Receipt

This is the easy part — you just need to make it simple for the end-user to receive your card. This is mostly a question of making them easy for you to carry, and easy for the end user to fit in whatever they use to carry cards — usually a pocket, sometimes a business card holder. Some otherwise brilliant collateral pieces can be difficult to carry in bulk, or for your end user to take home:³

Many end-users will also try to make notes on their interaction with you on the card you gave them. This is particularly true at conferences and networking events — just the times when you make the most contacts. Two common and one uncommon design techniques can torpedo this phase:

Dark colors on both sides of the card can’t be written on:

A better solution is to use dark on one side and light on the other:
This card, the end user can write a note on easily.

Coated stock and metallic inks also can’t be written on with many pens:

Use uncoated stock, and metallic on just one side. Here’s a great example of a metallic detail that makes a difference while not making the card hard to write on:

Plastic or metal cards simply can’t be written on:

Storage

This is probably the hardest part of the lifecycle to get right. Business cards are stored in one of the following ways:

In a little pile on a desk
In a notebook, plastic sheets with business card-sized sleeves
In a rolodex, stapled to a card
In a program like Outlook, manually entered
In a program like Outlook, scanned in through a specialized business card scanner

That’s five potential ways that your card needs to be stored. Many cards fail one or more of these.

Great collateral piece, but not scannable and may not fit in notebook sleeves:

Providing a physical item that illustrates what you can do is a great way to make your card stand out, but make sure that item can be easily removed:

Plastic can’t be stapled or scanned:

Retrieval and contact

This is where you make money, so make it work! If you’ve done well on the storage part of things, then you should be ok. Make sure that you have enough information on your card that the recipient can figure out what it is that you do and what value you can offer to them. This may mean that you need a line to explain what you do. For instance, the card on the right is better than the one on the left for just this reason:

Retrieval can be difficult if there’s not information displayed on the outside of the card; a card in a notebook sleeve or stapled to a rolodex card may not be looked inside:
If you’re using a die cut — and they can be beautiful — best is to pick one that also works when flat:

For contact, just make sure to have enough information on the card that they can contact you. I hope that these cards have more on the other side:⁴

Of course, there’s such a thing as too much information; then people can’t read your card:

Better is to have just enough information:

It’s hard to make a good business card — the difficulty of design is often underestimated. But designers can overdesign, too — great design supports and enables use. A good business card enables use and makes it easy to contact you.

Card images from business card photoset on Flickr

¹ Or, you do if your marketing is any good.

² Maybe someone else passed it on to them, in an interaction outside of any circle in which you’ve ever marketed yourself!

³ I think both of these are beautiful, and the right product under the right circumstances, but not good general-purpose business cards.

⁴ If all of the necessary information is on the other side, why not leave this side mostly blank for notes?

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