Kim Stuart branding: business cards

As part of her promotional pack, Kim requires business cards.

We decided to follow the grey and yellow colour scheme applied to the rest of the branding, as opposed to business cards with photographs on them. This will make the person in possession of the business cards inclined to visit Kim's website to see her work.

fig 1

fig 2

Initially, having the logo in a large scale on the front of the business card (fig 1) made an impact but after reducing the size of it (fig 2), the card looked more understated and less brash.

On a business card, contact information is vital and Kim has 3 modes of contact she wanted on her business cards. I needed to find a way to display this information clearly while still keeping a cohesive look across the products within the branding. Keeping the contact in list form echoes the list of information on the bottom of the mountboard in the promotional pack. Also the lines in some versions of the card (see fig 3, 5, 6, 7 and 9) echoes the lines used in the creative CV, this makes the branding consistent.

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fig 5

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fig 9

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In some options I included the name part of Kim's logo but I felt that as the front of the card had the logo already this may not be needed. Keeping the back simple to include just the contact information contrasted with the large logo on the front of the card and made it easily readable and not confusing.

Kim decided that figure 5 would be the best layout for the contacts on her business cards as the information looked put together but still looked professional.

Going on to adjust the colour slightly, I chose a shade of grey lighter than the initial experiments as I felt the first colour was too dark and would 1. be more expensive to print and 2. not fit the rest of the branding as well. 

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I created 2 versions of the business card, one which is digitally printed and ready to be distributed (fig 11 and 12), and one which will be stitched into (fig 13). Just the icon within the logo will stitched as the text is too small to be stitched and needs to be clearly legible. In order to be stitched over, I have lowered the opacity of the icon to about 40%. This creates a kind of guide for the stitches, but ensures that the printed icon will not be visible under the stitches.

fig 13

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Production

Printing the business cards was an issue as the printers weren't working as usual. After adjusting the document we were finally able to print the business cards double sided. The colours printed darker in real life than they were on screen, the grey wasn't as light as Kim and I wanted, but the colour still tied into aspects of the branding such as the titles in the CV and the 'Kim Stuart' part of the logo on the promotional pack.

Leaving the larger logo business cards as they were, the business cards with the information on the front were abe to be sewn into. Due to the lower opacity of the icon within the logo, the stitches were able to cover the print, while it acted as a guide for the stiching.

Initially when Kim and I came up with this idea, a concern of ours was that the stitches on the back of the card would look messy and easily breakable. However, I was able to make the stitches look neat and this stopped the stitching from detracting from our aim of a professional looking card.