I have already created some business cards during my college
education, however these are not up to a high standard and I do not feel
confident handing them out. The photograph I used was not considered fully and
they were not the best photographs to use. I also used a brown text theme which
matched the photograph as it was colour picked from within the image however I
do not feel this looks professional so I am going to be creating some new
cards.
I have some ideas for my cards; I want to show my retouching
skills and my product photography skills so I am going to use one of my new
works I am creating for this latest project, I am going to make it bright and
colourful so that it stands out and is easily spotted and memorable. In order to do this I need to create some
designs that would transform into a business card without losing any details.
Vistaprint
is the company I used previously and I do think that these cards could be used
by regular business as they are of decent quality however I do not think they
should be used by photography businesses as the quality of the photographs does
not come out as high as I would have liked; this may be in part to the camera
and processing of my images however I do not remember what I sent in so I
cannot compare this to present photographs. I will not be using this company
for this reason.
Below is an example of the business card GC Photo-Grafics
has prepared and hands out to customers; after talking to the manager at GC
Photo-Grafics and explaining that through the university project I needed to
create business cards he gave me permission to use the logo and branding within
my own personal business cards.
Personally I feel the card could be a higher standard as the
quality feels cheap and tacky; as though it is just laminated paper. Also the
branding typography is not my personal style but I know I must still use this
in my own business card in order to represent the company.
After knowing I would have to create a professional standard
company style card I have researched different company cards and how they
represent themselves and the company. I have found that many of them are just
plain black and white or the branding colour of the business, I have kept this
in mind when I have been creating my own cards and have used the red white and
black theme.
I got the design from
the card while I was looking online at template designs, I found one which I
could download, on the design it shows a multitude of different portraits, this
is what inspired me for this card because using more than one photograph means
I can show off more than just one skill and I can show that I have skills in
the type of photography the studio is offering.
On the back of the card it shows the studio logo and the
information for it, I personally do not like the typography for the studio logo
but I understand that I cannot change this and I must stick to using this in my
final design. I have also included the list of the types of photography the
studio offers so people can clearly see what we offer. I have put my phone
number and the managers phone number as I thought these would be essential and
I have included the Facebook page because this is where most of the studios
business is generated through advertising on there.
To get to my final design it took many different attempts
and designs, once I had found the template I knew that I was going to use a
design that was like this to show off my images because I wanted to stand out
and this template helped me achieve this.
The typical photographers business cards only show one image and
originally I had created templates using just one image; however with the
studio in mind I wanted to be able to show off multiple photographs at once to
show a broader range of skills and to gather people’s interest.
These are just some of the design processes I went through
to create my final design:
These are some of the working designs I screenshot as I was
working on my business card, the first two I do not think are successful
because these were too crowded with information and I think everything got lost
on the page. The design did not look right to me but I could not figure out
what was ‘wrong’ with it, I asked a few peoples opinions and they said that it
was weird that all the information was split into two halves and that I needed
to decide who the card was for before I could fix it.
I took this advice on board and I designed my card with the
studio and advertising myself as a studio worker; I asked permission to use the
branding and logo in my business card after explaining that I needed to create
a card for my university module, I got permission from the manager to design a
card as long as I would ask for approval before printing anything.
While designing I looked back over the card I had been given
from the manager and I thought that it would be a good idea to include the list
of photography the studio offers, I tried different positioning of the list and
found that after clearing up the card a little the one long list looked more
professional than the two lists. I also decided to remove the stripe because
while I liked this in the first designs it now just appeared distracting and
unnecessary.
During the Graduates Exhibition we have the opportunity to
advertise ourselves with our business cards and any fliers or postcards that we
create, I think I am also going to create an A5 flyer with the same design that
the business card is using. I am going to do this so that people can see the
photographs more clearly on the a5 but have the option to take the business
card as a smaller reminder.
I have ordered:
- - 350gsm Silk flyers, a5, double sided x 100
- - 450gsm Silk (Velvet) Business Cards, Double Sided x 250
I ordered 250 business cards because I knew they would be
extremely useful in the future and would not need to be changed or updated
until I had handed them all out; but by then I would be in the studio and have
professional looking photographs that are even more relevant to what we can do
in the studio. Also at the time I ordered they were having a sale that made the
price for 250 cards only £1 more expensive than buying 100 cards.
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