Business cards are like FAX machines. No matter how advanced the rest of the world gets, those two business left-overs just. won’t. go. away.
It’s OK… when the grid goes down because of Iranian or Russian hackers, we’re gonna be glad we hung on to SOMETHING from the physical world. :))
I’m actually on the fence about usefulness of facsimile machines, but I still find the business card useful. Very useful. I’ve blogged in the not-so-recent past about my favorite business-card scanning apps. See:
The follow-up to those articles is that I’ve gone completely over to ScanBizCards. They were recently acquired by CircleBack, and the app is even better than before.
The REAL REASON for this blog, though…
…is a reminder that you do not have to work your way through all the hundreds of business cards you have remaining from the box you ordered 8 years ago just because you’re frugal, and you have to use them all up! (Is the branding still up-to-date?)
Business cards are amazingly easy and cheap to order online. I almost hate to have to admit that I think VistaPrint is still the best deal. They just make it so easy to design your own card, and if you can dodge all the many many attempts they make to squeeze more STUFF out of your order, you can keep the budget to something reasonable. I almost went with Zazzle.com, but in the end VistaPrint won out for a couple of reasons: price and ease of designing.
About 6 years ago, I made a HUGE order of cards that look like this (below) . I probably have 2-3,000 of them remaining.
You’ll notice they’re white print on black background. Not good. ‘Hard to read (designers talk about this, but for some reason I ignored their admonitions). They’re printed on both sides. I’ll explain below why that’s’ a disadvantage. And they’re glossy; also bad because they tend to stick together, and because they’re black, that means they acquire specks real easily when you pry them apart. That looks sloppy.
Here’s my new VistaPrint card:
I took the picture of this card with my iPhone, so the colors are not exactly true, but you get the idea. The new card has a matte finish, with simple information (not overloaded), and the back has NOTHING on it. Great for taking notes. I had heard this before, and it’s absolutely true! It’s the handiest place to write a note to yourself about the person who just handed you a card…or an extra bit of information that they’re telling you when you meet them.
The whole message here. Keep it simple. Don’t overthink this. Cover the basics, and make it so the card can be digitally scanned easily.
I paid $42.00 for 500 of these. Shipping was $9.00.
‘Not sure what I’m going to do with all those thousands of old black biz-cards. Back-ups I guess. 🙂
CourVO
