Design my own business card
How to present myself by a business card?
In this week’s visual language assignment, I was required to design my own business card. I had three different business cards designed by others but this was my first try to design the card by myself, which was excited.
I started thinking about the information and the feeling I want to convey through the business card by style, layout, color, typography and logo. So here are my thoughts:
- Style: The simpler the better. I want the whole style to be concise and simple. I always prefer applying icon and geometry to express information.
- Layout: I prefer a vertical business card as I have seen many horizontal one, so a vertical card would help to stand out. I also prefer applying a rounded edge than the normal one as it looks smooth. I also think reading from up to down would strengthen people’s memory.
- Color: I chose midnight blue, light slate grey and white to become my color palette. This is because the values I want to convey through business card are trust-worthy and elegant, also because they are part of my personal color palette.
- Typography: I always choose Helvetica to be the main font of my design as it is classic and amiable as you can see it everywhere. But I applied Arial Round MT Bold to write my name as I like the feeling of this font behind: Strong yet soft. The font size of my name would be 11pt, and the font size of the contact would be 7pt.
- Logo: It was not an easy thing to design my own logo. So I started looking at my name to search more inspiration.
The geometry.
The first character of my name in Chinese means poem, and the second character means feather. First, I wanted to look at the shape of the character and came up with a geometric shape. I found the angle of the word Feather is quite intriguing, also because triangle is my favorite shape. Triangle is able to combine with each other to form different shapes yet are the most stable one, so I decided to apply triangle in the layout.
The logo.
My logo based on the meaning of my name. I would think poem is the most romantic way to express text, and reading beautiful verse would make flower blossom from the buttom of the heart. So I decided to apply rose to present poem. For feather is pretty much straightforward, just a piece of feather.
I tried to play these two symbles and combined to different types of things.
I also came up with an idea to apply rose in a faded feather. But due to the time and illustrating restriction, I was not able to do it.
I eventually decided to apply the first one, as the two feathers look like pairs of wings and the whole logo looks like a bird. I would love to be bird as well.
At the beginning, I made the whole back of the business card blue and put the logo in the middle of the card, but I thought it would be not friendly to the printer. Also the front side could be too plain if there is no blue. So I decided to make the back side white and put some geometry in the front, and applied the logo and the geometry blue.
The final one became like this:
I applied two triangle as it would look like a asymmetric wings in geometric version. I also applied a white feather next to my name as I found it looks pretty. The whole business card looks simple and concise, and I would think the style is what I want.
