"Why Do I Need Business Cards?"

Jaclyn Strain, Graphic Designer | 7-25-2016

Business cards are so old school. No one uses those anymore, right? Wrong. Every day we have new customers walking in the door looking for a well put-together business card. Everyone from your big corporate head to the guy down the street that teaches guitar lessons out of his garage needs business cards.

So what’s the point? If everyone has them, why bother? Business cards are a quick and efficient way to get your contact information into the hands of a potential client. Say you’re out at a social convention and strike up a conversation with the person standing next to you. They mention something about really needing to get their lawn mowed. What luck, you just so happen to be in the lawn-mowing business. What are you going to do? Will you just grab a napkin off a passing waitress and scribble down your information in hopes that the person will give you a call in the morning? No, that’s just not professional. If anything, the person will find the napkin later, forget your information is on it and toss it in the trash. No new client for you.

If you had a business card in your pocket you could have handed that to the person and potentially made a new client. A business card is great because you never know when you might run into a potential client and need to appear professional to get their business.

What should be on my business card? We get this question a lot. It seems so straight forward and yet the task of deciding what to go on your card can be a daunting one. When in doubt, stick to the basics; Company Name, Your Name, your position within the company, Company logo if you have one, and phone number. These are the bare-bone basics of what should be on the card. It tells them who you are, who you work for and a way to contact you. If it’s important to drive people to your physical address, put it on there too. That way they know where to go to find you. Have an email address? Put that on there as well. You may even want to put a web address on there.

Hey now, you’re starting to get a lot of stuff on there, this is a small card, won’t all that information just confuse someone? Potentially, yes. That’s where the well put-together design comes in. You can have a lot of information and when it’s put together right, your eye will be drawn to the information you want them to see. You prefer them to call rather than email or go to your physical address but still want those on there? Fair enough, bold the phone number, make it a point or two larger and your eye will be drawn to the phone number first. It’s all about the layout. A catchy design could make the difference between a glance and a re-examination. Don’t get too extravagant with the design though; you still want the information to be legible.