Business Cards

For a networking event I recently attended, I decided to print my own business cards.  So I thought I'd write this for any job seekers that might want some ideas on business cards. 

First, I guess I would suggest against getting the free business cards from some place like Vistaprint.  If you get the free ones, usually the printing company will put their logo and stuff on the back.  Maybe that's ok for some of you, especially students, but probably not for most people.  Because you also have to pay for shipping for those free cards, you only pay a little more to print them on your own. 

If you want to pay for a company to make your cards, by all means, do it, but the main reason that I want to print my own is that I want to have different cards with different job titles.  I have a few strengths, which I believe qualify me for somewhat different job titles so I want to make sure that whoever I meet.  Something else that you might want to do is make a generic plain card and this is what you use when you have to put your card in a box, say at a networking event or a big conference. 

As to the design of your cards, I've been told to stay away from clip art.  Usually, it looks cheesy and designs I tried out that had clip out were only moderately liked by my wife.  A while back, a friend of mine did a fun drawing that kind of looks like.  I wanted to use this as my business card picture, but my wife and I felt that it wasn't professional looking enough and I didn't draw it myself either.  Maybe I'll use it if I make actor business cards for when I'm on the set (Let's hope.)  It's OK to have big clocks of color just on the card.  However, color ink does cost a lot, and on my first sheet of a card with lots of blue squares, I noticed my blue ink started to fade by the bottom cards.  I'll play with that some more in the future.

I don't know if this helped, but I'm sure I'm going to try printing some more business cards in the future, and I'll post if I have some more tips.