New Designs for the Cards You Hand Out in the Room
The card layouts have been redrawn. There are six now, all of them tested at actual print size rather than designed on a screen at four times the size they will ever be seen at.
The problem with the old set
They were designed like small posters. At 85 millimeters wide, on card, in a room with bad light, half the type was too small and the code was competing with a photograph for attention.
A card is not a piece of design you look at. It is a piece of design somebody glances at while talking to you, puts in a pocket, and finds again three days later with no memory of the conversation. Everything follows from that.
What the new layouts do differently
- The name is large. Larger than feels comfortable when you are designing it. This is the one thing that must be readable at arm's length.
- The code has its own space. Not overlapping a photograph, not tucked into a corner at 12 millimeters. It gets a clear field, because a code that fails to scan makes the whole object pointless.
- Fewer elements. Name, role, one contact route, code. The maximum is five things and most of the layouts use four.
- The back is used. Two of the six put the code alone on the reverse, which is the cleanest arrangement if you are printing double sided.
Should there be a headshot on it
Genuinely contested, and both answers are defensible. In favor: people remember faces and not names, and at an event with two hundred people your card without a photograph is one of two hundred identical rectangles.
Against: a headshot printed at 20 millimeters is not a headshot, it is a smudge, and it costs you the space that would have made your name legible.
The compromise most people land on is a small tight crop on the front or a larger one on the reverse. Three of the six layouts include one. Try both before you print, which is what the preview is for.
Match it to everything else
The card uses the accent color from your website settings, the same one behind your signature photo treatment and your site's color scheme. Somebody who meets you, takes the card, and later opens your website should feel like they arrived in the same place.
Related
Print-ready files, scan tracking, and the original QR card announcement.
Create your free actor website and design a card from it.
