On Calling Cards
A Light Card Can Do a Lot of Heavy Lifting
One of design’s most intractable problems is also one of its longest-running staples: the business card. Some call for its demise; others throw up their hands in confusion at its weed-like persistence; still others point to sound-and-fury articles with defiant titles like “Why I Ditched the Business Card (And Why You Should, Too)” that shuffle their feet and dial back their argument towards the end, concluding that a better solution doesn’t yet exist.
But business cards, like print in general, aren’t disappearing. They’re evolving, becoming more rarefied, where even just having one becomes a stand-out opportunity. One that can offer an advantage, a throwback bit of class in the era of handles, vCards, phone-bumping, and discretionary social networks. One that’s managed to bring me luck, work, and friendships along the way. So, I keep designing them for my clients and redesigning them for myself. Below’re the backstories of three different cards that I’ve used for my own practice.
Flip the Script
Calling cards get dismissed as déclassé, a piece of luddite technology in the era of the smartphone. People will sometimes ask, why go through the trouble of printing the information on a small token of paper? Don’t most cards get thrown out within a week? But even a week adds up to a few thousand TV spots. An item sitting on someone’s desk or dresser will remain in their line of sight longer than a billboard. With a bit of well-polished luck, an innovative or clever card will live in someone’s mind for an even more extensive stretch of time.
Out of all the cards I’ve used, these black-and-white-on-blue cards feature most prominently in people’s memories. Thus, they simultaneously hold the podium for being the most useful, while at face value presenting as the least informative.
I debuted these cards in two-thousand-and-eight. Even more than now, I existed in multiple realms and wanted cards that I could give out no matter what kind of conversation the exchange followed. Ones that didn’t tie me to a specific task. My expertise lies in the overlap of design, tech, typography, a certain wit, and a proclivity for information layering combined with a minimal aesthetic. My cards, perhaps the only piece of my work I could carry and share with ease, needed to reflect that instantly. Something open-ended that could keep people talking.
Facing one way, the card just says “hELLO”, a direct enough start to any dialogue. Upon rotation, the cards read “5304307734”, a US-based phone number that will still reach me if messaged. The type is a simple, custom seven-segment design. A semantic nod to the pager era, or the days of the graphing calculator — a time of codes and juvenile jokes that would reveal themselves upon turning the display upside down. (As a back-up Easter-egg, both 5304307734.com and helloehoes.com will redirect to my website.)
While I haven’t handed these out in years (collector’s edition!), people still mention them or pass the story on to others, corroborating that calling cards are simply another opportunity just waiting to be reimagined.
Top Brass
The cards that supplanted those zagged in a much different direction, towards maximalist information-stuffing. This periphrastic take was driven by the desire to show off a then-recent typeface, Corsair (to be publicly released via Rosetta Type Foundry this autumn), and court new type clients for Latin and Cyrillic design work.
Corsair, originally commissioned by Best Made Co., is a rough, blocky, hand-writ slugger inspired by WWII fighter jet posters. The font performs at its peak when kept small and tightly packed with information, and shimmering in the details of its imperfections. In a time when there are many ways to reach people—and no one knows which will persevere—the font’s compact and sturdy shape made it perfect for listing an abundance of options. The gold-foil on white elevated and balanced the irregular edges of the type, allowing the design to exist somewhere between humble and elevated, or, as one collaborator summarized working with me, containing equal amounts of grit and princess.
Edge Case
With this latest design, I started by talking through the same set of inquiries I do with clients: Where are these cards going to live? Who’s going to be looking at them? What’s the current scene there? And what action do you want people to take after seeing them?
As a consultant, strategist, and typographer, I live in spaces surrounded by graphic designers and the graphic-designer-adjacents. While duplexed and heavyweight stock was unique when I started using it in the early two-thousands, by the time I was considering these in 2016, heft had become the default. The paper-weight inflation was starting to feel like an arms race—a race that didn’t necessarily veer toward practicality, nor ease of use. With the thicker cards, less than a dozen fit in a standard card case or wallet, limiting how many can be carried at a time… thus making you suss out the group you’re talking to, as to which of your cohorts might be worthy of a card.
As no one says, but easily could, if you want to stick out amongst a rookery of penguins, it pays to be a zebra. With that slalom in mind, I needed to figure out what could be uniquely light, feel elegant to the touch, have a high tear-factor as to not fall apart, good opacity to be easily legible, and the ability to be written on with either pen or pencil (a must for all my cards). After a bit of investigation, in a lightbulb moment, I realized that people have been perfecting a paper with all of these exact traits for millennia—for bibles.
Once the paper was established, and sourced—there’re definitely some amusing phone call transcriptions from that errand, it was time to typeset. I set the card in my upcoming font release, Wyeth, making sure to show off some of my favorite features (these cards are brought to you by the numbers 8 and 5, and the center-aligned mini-caps). Considering the ways I prefer to be contacted, the email was left off — a pit of communication quicksand if ever there was one. Instead, the cards encourage people get straight to the point by texting or calling, while leveraging that my name’s lengthiness makes me very easy to find.
The final touch in production was bringing the cards back around to their biblical touchstone by gilding the edges, making the contact information the book, chapter, and verse of these mini-scriptures. As an additional unexpected perk: Bible pages happen to work really well as rolling papers, handy if you ever need to smoke away the evidence after memorizing my contact details.
The Take-Away
Strictly speaking, these business cards have little in common. Fluctuating between minimalist and hyper-informative, their structures, and even their purposes, are quite varied. Though they all follow a starting set of guidelines:
🃏 Design for your audience, and your core purpose. What works for a friend, or a company in your field, isn’t necessarily what’s going to work best to represent you.
🃏 Leave room for write-ins. It’s useful to jot memos on cards during the exchange, reminding exactly what it is one wants to follow up on. So, allow for intentional empty space, consider the paper texture and/or coating.
🃏 Think through to the production. The recipient is going to feel the card in their hand even before looking close enough to read it. You’ve only so much real-estate, use it all to reinforce your point.
While it’s definitely possible to get away without business cards—especially in the West, and amongst younger demographics—at a time when traditions are disappearing and everything feels fleeting, returning to rituals can provide a moment of grace. A card may be the only token someone has of your chance encounter. Make it memorable.
