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Moogs
Hates the Infotainment
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: NSA Archives
 
2008-07-08, 08:57

Not terrible, but a few comments and criticisms:

• As a designer, your boyfriend's Dad should know that using diagonal text on a business card is iffy at best. It makes reading them at a glance more difficult. Especially with those colors (see below).

• Black text on red is very hard to read and just a bad design choice no matter what you're doing IMO. In general bright red is a lousy background color for small text. It's very jarring to the eye unless you have bold black lettering on a large poster or something like that. This is design 101.

• Stark red and white as a theme, don't communicate very well who you are / what your profession is about IMO. Red is too strong a color. It should be an accent not the major thematic color. The little x's inside the letters or the o in "dot" could be this color red, but not half the card.

• Anything not a rectangle is a BAD idea for a business card unless you make origami for a living. I know it's clever and stands out. But, by asking the person you're giving it to, to take extra time to read it or figure it out, and then find a way to fit it into their standard card size slots, is a mistake. All great business card designs are simple, and fit within everyone's standard rollodex, dayplanners, etc. A diamond shaped card (though technically a square rectangle if set on edge) is not going to make someone go "wow, very clever". Instead it will probably just get shuffled under some other debris on their desk or wind up in the trash because they couldn't immediately just slide it into their card holding system.

Personally, among these, I would choose the one at top right (assuming the horizontal variant below is the opposite side of said card). It is the easiest among all of them to read and stuff in your wallet or day planner. Not a big fan of the font used for your name on this card, however.

Also, IF you really like these designs, I would experiment with different spot colors beyond fire engine red. Try flavors of green (darker shades), blue (blue-greens or blue-grays maybe) or brown (bronze or rusty variants for example) as your counterpart to white. If you want to go red, go towards maroon IMO. Same design, just swap in some of these other colors for the red and see which ones you like. Then use a brighter color with more pop for the accent on the letters or whatever design elements are ultimately used.

No offense to you or your boyfriend but I kind of question whether you should go with his Dad as the designer, unless he has tons of other cards in his portfolio to show. There are many biz card designers online that will do a great job for you and have really nice portfolios, and probably aren't too expensive.

...into the light of a dark black night.

Last edited by Moogs : 2008-07-08 at 09:08.
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