New business cards

The business is official, the business cards have arrived!

Ninth Division business cards

Yes, that is an iPhone style business card you see.  Cool eh?  I think so.

Like man creative businesses I have met, having a black and white business card is a big “no-no”.  I mean, if you are a creative type and you show people for the first time no creativity… well in the words of Adam Sandler – “they’re all going to laugh at you“.

compare the iphone size to the business cards

When brainstorming business card ideas, many designs came to mind.  A few ideas were a web browser showing my website’s contact/about page.  Another was to look like Textmate and  the writing of the card was some pseudo code.  But when the iPhone idea was like EUREKA!  I love my iPhone.  The business also builds iPhone applications (but not limited to ).  It also has an element of that new age after “web 2.0″ that no one can figure out how to name.

As you can see it measures the same size as the iPhone 3G.  The card measures 2.4″ wide by 4.5″ high.  The corners are rounded like the iPhone.  To do that I had to order a new die to do the die cutting.  I guess that is pretty standard in the printing world; something I know very little much about.  With the new die, the printing company can do the die cutting to do the rounded sides.

I think my favorite is the back side.  Where the Ninth Division badge replaces the Apple logo in the same spot.  We kept the similar gray font color for the back as well.  The bottom replaces the fine print on the iPhone with the all important contact information.

The biggest challenege was coming up with something cool at the bottom of the contact information.  Originally I was going to have the “notes” section give a business sounding slogan.  Or possibly description of things Ninth Division can do.  But at last minute the tag cloud idea came up.  No matter you opinion of tag clouds on the web, I felt having keywords describe the business is a better idea.  This will also be great for new hires; say a designer can put their skills there and a sales person can describe themselves there.  It’s fantastic conversation starters.

Whether it’s this business card design or something else, I have been wondering why more cards don’t include a pictures of yourself.  The point of the card is to give to someone to remember you by.  Sure they have your contact information on it.  They know what company you work for, etc.  But for me if I had a card with picture of the person I talked with, I’m more likely to remember that **person**.  More importantly, it gives a more human touch to the card.

Jessica Booth did the design work for me.  She is a pro at Illustrator and Photoshop, so if I even attempted it… the cards would have burned up at the printing company somehow.  We used NextdayFlyers.com.  She has used them before a lot for quality work; no challenge there.  I thought they had great customer service and their prices were on par with everyone else.  Two weeks after approving the second proof (minor problems on the first one), they were at my door.

a great perspective

As you can see, there are a lot of business cards to get rid of.  I ordered a thousand.  When they arrived from FedEx I couldn’t wait to hand them out to anyone who had eye balls.

That night I went to the Omaha Tweetup.  I brought about 25 cards thinking that would be more than enough… whoops.  I should have brought one for everyone; all 90 or whatever.  People were passing them all around.  Prentending they were phones and putting them to their ears.  Some were playing with the interface and doing iPhone gestures… probably trying to get to the games.  Heck I also had a number of folks come and find me to setup business meetings.  Heck yah!  Success baby.  Not to mention the OmahaTweetup was a great time… shameless plug.

Not only handing this cards out is fun, but thinking about hireing people is even more fun.  When those days come, I hope the people Ninth Division hires will like these things as much as I do.

1. Ready for business