The Business of Cards

I did a post just over a year ago about making business cards for Orla's Code, or, The I.T. Girl, as it was then. Without an eye for design I really struggled with a few attempts at this. Recently I came back to the exercise for the updated Orla's Code. Again, I played around with a few formats. I even went fancy with Vista, putting the book cover on one side and the cover again on the other side, but as a water-colour behind the information. It looked nice online but when I received the cards, the information printed over the water-colour was just hard to read. 

Again, companies that produce cards: please let us print samples of different designs. Fifty cards that all have the same fatal space aren't that much help to me.

So I went back to moo.com and after more experiments, I went back to the advice given on the previous post above and would now like to add this bit of advice to the list: if like me you don't have a flair for layout then just make sure everything is even. With the blurb I went to quite a bit of trouble to write something that fitted perfectly on the card so that every piece of information is separated by exactly one line. I also tried to keep the width of the writing consistent and I think this adds to the sense of symmetry. So that's all I got - keep it symmetrical!  Oh, and simple. I tried varying the font, I tried making my website information a different colour/size so that it would stand out. I found it hard to tell looking at it online but when I held these cards in my hands, I could just see the design looked odd - amateur.

Here's the final result. On the upside, after all this messing, producing cards for Beverly is going to be quick!