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popantique
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Join Date: Jun 2008
Location: San Francisco, CA
 
2008-07-08, 16:21

Quote:
Originally Posted by Moogs View Post
• 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).
[...]
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.
The cards are based mostly on rough sketches he made in my sketchbook after having seen my old, hideous business cards, which otherwise don't even bare mention here. I'll scan the page if I can dig up the sketchbook in question (it's not on the shelf where it belongs).

I'm not really "going with" his dad as the designer; he just helped me. He did the aforementioned sketches, and whipped up the square card, then left me to my own devices after about 10 minutes since I'm not a real client and he was just helping me for fun. So most of the failings of these cards are pretty much my fault (except for the square shape, which I think I will keep but only use for hang-tags). I trust his work and his input; he did the logos for several well-known businesses around here (Monterey, if anyone lives in California), and his work focuses on brand imaging. I don't really care to hire someone to do the cards, I'd rather do it myself and stumble a bit along the way but get them exactly how I like (I can be very type A.)


Quote:
Originally Posted by Moogs View Post
• 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.

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.
Oh, ye gods. I really, really like the pink. (It's supposed to be that strawberry-imac-is-it-pink-or-red-shade.) I'm not blowing off the idea of other colors out of hand, I will definitely mess around with them, but there are just no others that I really like enough to want them to represent me. To me, the pink says "bright, energetic, youthful." Even though I know it's cliche, black/white/red or black/white/charcoal are my favourite color sets to use. When I was doing my website, I tried using purple and teal, but it's hard to find a shade the conveys the same vibrancy that I would expect out of a similar shade if it was a tangible object (such as a yard of silk).

Quote:
Originally Posted by Moogs View Post
• 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.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bryson View Post
As a person who gets business cards on a regular basis from all sorts of different people in different businesses:

Nonstandard shapes aren't "cool" or "distinctive". They don't fit in my business card storage and are irritating.
I think by mutual opinion of pretty much everyone I've asked plus my own logical evaluation, the square cards are out. But for the record, I don't plan to hand these out like after-dinner mints. There were times when I lived in LA where people saw me with my sketchbook or my pattern set and they would stop and ask me if I did design/pattern drafting and then they would ask for my contact information. Obviously no one ever calls if you just write your phone number on a scrap of notebook paper. I intend more to use the business cards as a means of contact with people who are already interested.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Moogs View Post
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.
Yes, the horizontal is intended to be the flipside of that card. I like that card because it's easy to read, but my second thought every time I look at it is that it looks really 'standard.'


Quote:
Originally Posted by Bryson View Post
I like the top right, but why is the e-mail address obfuscated? "(at) (dot)" ...spammers can't trawl business cards....
Quote:
Originally Posted by fcgriz View Post
That's my main gripe. That's a necessary annoyance online, but in print it's just needlessly frustrating. In fact, if I saw that on a business card, I'd probably throw it away.
It has to do with the font I used, which doesn't have an @ sign for some reason. I am not sure why I didn't just use courier for that one character as I did on all the other variations.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Is it 1981? View Post
Personally, I would get rid of the stylised Marianne Faulkner logo - there's already a nice popantique.com logo on there and I wouldn't want another logo to clash with that.
I think I was just looking for an excuse to use that font. I should've used my instincts (which were telling me "That's too many fonts!") and left well enough alone, though.

Quote:
Originally Posted by ezkcdude View Post
But the typeface for the rest of the text is too hard to read.
I admit that the font is easier to read in larger sizes. The reason I used it is because it is the font in the logo: I came up with the idea for the logo, and was trying to figure out what fonts to use to create it. I knew "pop" should be some bubbly looking font, but I wasn't sure about "antique." My friend Alex said something along the lines of, "What about a typewriter font? But not a normal one; one that's kind of gritty and old looking." And I thought it was perfect: I like monospace fonts because I'm slightly Monk-ish with balance/symmetry, and using something that actually looks like it came from a typewriter gives it a little bit of quirk and a vintage feeling.

Quote:
Originally Posted by ezkcdude View Post
That said, your website is very nicely designed, indeed. I wouldn't change a thing there.
Thank you! I'm kind of surprised that I keep getting compliments on it, as my knowledge of HTML and website building is approximately equivalent to half a semester of a basic web design course at a JC.


Anyway, I'll go poke around in AI some more and try to refine a bit based on all your suggestions. Thank you, everyone for your input.
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