Business Card Development

Case study: Redesigning a business card

Tak­ing an existing design and reinvigorating it with more contemporary and rel­e­vant design for com­pa­nies as they grow and evolve is a frequent need in fast mov­ing dynamic envi­ron­ments.  We can’t take longevity in busi­ness for granted, so rein­vent­ing oneself and one’s business is tac­tical for sur­vival.  Take the following case of two business cards for example…

The prob­lem was some existing busi­ness cards that belonged to a busi­ness being bought under the auspices of a new owner.  The new owner wanted some­thing more engag­ing that better reflected the busi­ness.  (The logo was not up for re-engineering, so we could not — despite want­ing to — touch it.)

ANALYSIS

Typog­ra­phy

The tagline was in a script style font for a Computer/Hardware sale/repair busi­ness.  Appro­pri­ate if you are sell­ing art or flow­ers. The font needs to have asso­ci­a­tions of solid­ity, depend­abil­ity, effi­ciency, for­ward look­ing. For that, I looked at Futura font.

Images

In the old cards this con­sisted of lines and wispy smoke blue back­grounds that were more rem­i­nis­cent of ephemeral, drift­ing, easy going busi­nesses, which is prob­a­bly not con­sis­tent with impres­sions of seri­ous engi­neer­ing and solid crafts­man­ship.  Perhaps a few engi­neer­ing gears and cogs and strong geo­met­ri­cal shapes might lend itself to a dif­fer­ent per­cep­tion? The PC image is good and sim­ple but per­haps needs revamp­ing to a more mod­ern image of machines in the mar­ket now.

Colour

Blue is a solid colour sug­gest­ing trust­wor­thi­ness, amongst other things (dynamic, fresh, etc.) and one wants to have cus­tomers feel that they can trust one to fix their com­put­ers.  It is already in exis­tence in the logo and from the design per­spec­tive of rep­e­ti­tion, and not depart­ing too far from cus­tomer asso­ci­a­tions; there was cause to main­tain this.  The Blue and Orange that are on the logo rep­re­sent what is known as “com­pli­men­tary colour sets” in design lan­guage, mean­ing that they are on the oppo­site sides of the colour wheel. This gives them the high­est con­trast lev­els.  Repeat­ing these colours in the redesign main­tains all these associations.

Lay­out

Small con­sumer based com­puter sales and repair com­pa­nies are a dime a dozen and the names are many and var­ied.  Being cus­tomer cen­tric and, given someone’s Rolodex prob­a­bly has dozens of these cards, the tagline for the firm’s ser­vice is of prob­a­bly greater use to engage the cus­tomer than the busi­ness name.  What is on the top of the card will be spot­ted first a customer is leafing through a Rolodex, card box or their wallet. The geeks amongst us may know who Sea­gate, Asus or Net­gear are but do the con­sumer mar­ket know or care?  The ques­tion should be, is the card to engage us or our cus­tomers? Mul­ti­ple email addresses (although admit­tedly defunct for rea­son of change of busi­ness own­ers) will leave the cus­tomer won­der­ing which one to use.  And, finally, does any­one use a fax nowadays?

The redesign

Back­ground images of gears and cir­cuit boards were incorporated, and the tagline was placed top and cen­tre in large font.  The logo below the tagline as it is on the shop front and is an estab­lished busi­ness iden­ti­fier.  Real estate address was placed one side and con­tact infor­ma­tion on the other.  Keep­ing it sim­ple, with a single phone num­ber and e-mail address.  The result is shown below…