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Also, I have always thought what would make a really cool business card, would be a live install of OpenSuse (built with suse studio) that would be small enough to live boot off one of those business card sized CDs and have it auto-launch your website, your resume, and the whole theme of the install would be made by you. Considering I am an Open Source (activist) that would work very well for me :)

One common misconception about business cards, is the need to have a radically different card. It is nice to have something that shows you can be creative, and provide functionality when it comes to your card, and luckily in the field you are in you have the best chance of getting away with a off shaped card, however, for most people they should stick to a standard card stock because its what fits nicely in a wallet, and if you are picking it up from a stack of cards, it will not fall out. Memorable - yes, easy to lose - no. Honestly, for creative cards you would have three great options.

One "card" that would be creative and does slightly fall out of the "scope" would be a cheap small speaker, that you put in putty, and stick high on a wall in the city (in an art district) and have motion sensor on it, so that when someone walks by you give them a quick pitch. This could be witty and artsy, plus a bold statement. They grab the speaker, and it has your contact information on it. However, that is not very practical in real life.

If you wanted to be practical but a tad different, then I would create a 2x2 square, put your contact information in a QR code on one side... and on the other side it simply says "Your Solution" and provide your name, number on that side. http://www.travismccrea.com/images/serena.png is an example.. though the font is off I would use something a little more attractive yet still simple. The font apple used a lot something pro which is in Adobe Photoshop is great. However, that seems a bit simple for your desire so I have one more that is doable but not very practical.

you have a card within another card (or one card that flaps over to be more simplistic this would probably be 2X3.5). The card on the outside has holes cut in it so you can see the letters through the holes and that would display the word Solutions on the outside, then when you removed the inside card it would say "Thinking Outside The Box" with your contact information.

I am a huge fan of minimalism, and giving my client my name and my service to remember is my number one goal, so I want to make my card elegant while still providing a simple word or phrase to remember. I used a card to pick up women, and on the front, it says "Travis McCrea" and my phone number below it. On the back it says "Call me or Text me". It was simple, the product is me, they have my name, they have my number (I may have had an email on there as well) and the font choice was elegant enough for it to be pulled off. This is why I keep suggesting to you to use the phrase "Your Solution" you offer many services, don't get tied down with all the things you offer, you have a beautiful card, and you hopefully already made some impression and your not just randomly handing out your card. You now come across as confident, with a simple message. It will get you the clients.


A great paper that will always grab attention is a stock that I cannot seem to find by a quick search, but is what I call "Money Stock" it has that same money texture, and a small hint of green, but does not look at all like money, nor is it very green (you would have to put it against a white piece of paper to tell that its green for most people) however, the client will put the money sock paper in his mind with money, without thinking about it. Also when flipping through a binder full of cards that will stick out because it will remind them of money. You think I am crazy but this is the paper that I use to print important resumes on, and it hasn't failed me.

Also you want to organize the cards you have collected in a quick and easy way, that is easy to manage? Well then it would really depend on how technical you are willing to get:
I use a "black book" for all my clients, contacts, friends, and anyone else (wow I sound like I am some "pimp guy" thats not the case... at all haha) and ditch the cards. I then put a note next to certain people based on what they do and have a notes section in the front to also keep notes on these people.

If you do not need to take this with you, and you leave it at your desk, do what I do with my DVDs: consider using a baseball card book, then number each space. When you get home, you put the new card into the slot and put it in on an excel spreadsheet (for more effectiveness) their contact information again, and what type of business they offer, that way you can then sort by business type and quickly find what contact you are looking for (just as I will then sort by genre). You don't have to use the spreadsheet, it would just make it easier, you could also simply keep them in the baseball card binder and flip page by page... it would still be more effective then one of those old spinning things.

I hope that this has helped you, I have tons more suggestions when it comes to this area, and would love to be of more help. :) I will tell my friends about the post.

I agree with probably everyone else that it's about time to move onto digitized cards. However, if we're going to stay with physical cards, (since it is still more personable and professional to pass along something tangent) it has to be able to hold and transfer digitized information easily, yet still be resistant to data corruption and so you can transfer again if your digital versions were lost.

In order to do this, I was originally going to comment on RFID and 2d matrix barcodes. But seeing how Alex already talked about RFID, and Ben already commented on 2d matrix barcodes, I had to think of something crazy lol. Judging by how fast organic semiconductors are progressing (have you seen those new OLEDs? @_@) why not have the card material be polymer with some embedded flash memory and electrodes in a corner (think micro SD but probably even smaller) that you can plug into a reader.

Now you can either plug this into your computer (via a microSD -> SD adapter) or you can connect all of your cards into an electronic deck (which mimics a binder for your business cards that you can flip through), but you can also plug this hub/deck/binder into your computer, which automatically transfers the data contained on each card. That way even if your hard drive crashes, backing up all your cards is almost instantaneous.

I like the idea of having flash memory...for storage purposes and indexing. winner #1 :)

I'll have PrintRunner PR contact you directly

[[Promt 1]] I would keep the 'standard' size business cards, since it's rather bothersome to have to cut people's cards to fit into my antiquated business-card books -- but my creative ridiculous idea I stumbled up quite by accident, was bringing in the 4th dimension to hand out my cards. I added a series of jpegs to a sheet of buiness cards and little did I know that these images were not exact duplicates of each other. Rather, it time lapsed my sister and I working on my bamboo construction project, and when I finished making the stack of business cards, and I could filp through them, and it would animate! Yeah, a flip book that shows me designing and constructing a bamboo structure -- which is exactly what I was trying to communicate!

Ok. So now that I wrote that... maybe I would change the size of some of the buiness cards. What a concept, to have a stack of cards mean something more and you give away a piece of the bigger picture. And what a conversation starter! Good luck with your job search =>

4th prompt: "Business cards are not digital and therefore difficult to organize."

Digitize them.

As a guy with a fairly larger posterior, I hate it when my wallet fattens up. Whenever I make the drive down to SoCal and forget to set aside my wallet...by Coalinga, my butt sure lets me know it. One of the ways that I was able to slim down my wallet was by digitizing my medical insurance cards (3 thick plastic ones). I scanned them in, front and back, and shoved them into one big PDF which I've left on my MobileMe iDisk. There I can access it from my iPhone or other internet enabled device and Hurrah! My left butt cheek now rests 2.7mm lower!

Now I know business cards are a whole different entity deserving their physical space, especially with the creative genius behind some of them. But in terms of organization, I say "digitize away."

How you might ask? It's not as simple as just entering the data into some text fields and dropdown boxes. The beauty of the rectangular format should still be preserved as an image of some kind. I don't particularly have a well thought out interface for it, but I imagine some type of UI similar to Airtight's TiltViewer (http://www.simpleviewer.net/tiltviewer/app/). Each entry would be attached/associated to a vcard from the contact manager application of your choice ('Address Book.app' for example), allowing you to easily sort through and find the one you're looking for.

Then as this new digital format of business cards evolves, it would quickly respawn with all that interactivity and web mumbo jumbo that kids these days love (similar to what Apple did with iTunes LP - http://www.apple.com/itunes/whats-new/#itunes-lp)

Everything I wanted to say about business cards has been summed up by this guy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YBxeDN4tbk

But really, there shouldn't be any limitation of how big or what material your business card is. Although it should really fold up into a size no larger than 2 x 3.5" (or whatever the proposed size is -- but must be standard for easy archiving) or else it'll end up in the trash. And the material should definitely reflect your industry or skill-sets (which is why architecture students always abuse the laser cutter to make cool and free business cards).

And you, as an illustrator/designer/photographer/blogger, can take advantage of the folding technique (which I personally use a lot) to represent yourself as a professional in many areas. You could, for example, have the same "template" on every face of a fold, which some variation in material or color.

If business cards were not 2 x 3.5″ rectangular sheets of cardstock, what shape and material would they be and why? (We’ve entered a world of augmented reality; be as creative and ridiculous as you want!)

In my ideal world, all business cards would be digital, and part of everyone's digital wallet. They would be all XML, some visual components, and possibly an animation. Additionally, these could hold more metadata, such as links, favorite quotes, etc... essentially be an entire LinkedIn profile in your pocket.

Sharing these should be as easy as bumping into eachother, as in: http://www.pcworld.com/article/163840/meet_bump_the_app_stores_billionth_download.html

Or to go another route, if we want to keep physical business cards (since some are definitely pretty cool looking) each person's business card should also contain an RFID with a tag to some cloud based store of business cards that hold the same data in digital form. That way, we could still have the personal touch of sharing cards physically, but also be able to easily retrieve the data for storage. Passive RFIDs are dirt cheap these days (on the order of a few cents each), I don't see why these couldn't be incorporated into cards. Or for a simpler route, Microsoft Tags =)
http://www.microsoft.com/tag/

I like the idea of keeping a traditional form for the physical interaction yet having some cloud database w/all the digital info; also think having animation, links, etc. is cool too. winner #2!

I'll have a PrintRunner PR contact you directly :)

The business cards should be shaped so that they have a tab (or several) on one side so that the card stands out amongst a sea of other boring rectangular cards and (b) is easy to sort and hold on to. That, and, the cards themselves should have QR codes/bar codes on them so that someone with a smartphone can look up the person's website/LinkedIn page/email/phone/Twitter

If business cards weren't rectangular, they would definitely be square. It saves paper, and you can put all the information you need to convey in one box! Why use the extra space with special designs and pictures? I mean, there is a back side to get creative on!