Business Card Layout: Basic Techniques To Make Your Design Stand Out

If you’ve ever been shopping for a business card or some other type of hard copy for your business, you may have noticed that the days of the “cute” business card are on the way out. The new move is to standout products, not the rather basic, unambitious designs of the past. The business card printing industry, ironically in an all-digital environment, is doing a roaring trade in new designs. Standout, unforgettable designs are in demand, and a new generation of designers is enforcing the general move away from “dull, dull, dull”.

[m2leep]

The online logo designs are perhaps the best example of how far from “normal” advertisers and business owners are prepared to go. The new designs are straight out of the Effects panel on Adobe. Colours are moving from the pastel into the bright and attention getting. These new designs are intended to be grabbers, and that’s exactly what they’re doing.

Tens of thousands of graphic artists can make an impact, and they have. Thanks to vector design and much healthier imaginations, they’ve been progressively reinventing the business hard copy, from business cards to booklet printing like a force of nature.

Printers, too, were let off the leash with the new printing technology. It’s now possible to reproduce the most elegant, most complex digital designs down to the last pixel. The technical capacity of printing these days is a whole new class of design rendition. Printers can now produce truly immaculate reproductions to photographic standards, and it’s no coincidence that Photoshop has become almost surgically grafted on to commercial graphic design.

Basic techniques for standout designs

The typical design base for standout designs could have come straight out of a marketing manual:

Clear strong branding of a single image: An iconic logo, clearly laid out in a centralized design theme in most if not all cases.
Strong colour usage: Primaries and tones are the major backgrounds and they’re combined with rich colours in the logo designs.
Card finish: Used to enhance colours and create a nearly 3D effect, the high glaze cards are both tough and visually effective. This is “layering” in 3D on the cars, like an overlay to enhance depth, and it works.
Patterns: Some cards use interlaced patterns and colours to create their standout effect, like interlocking design elements, etc. This is an often dramatic effect, and using the right colour combination, it’s dazzling, and a true grabber.

Best practice in this card design is, as you may have already guessed, by vector drawing, to ensure control of the design elements. Vector allows design elements to have high mobility, and drastically improves the flexibility of design for uses from everything from logos to stationery.

The best business card designs are based on absolutely fundamental design paradigms- Strong images, strong backgrounds and high quality design materials. The printers deal with the materials elements, and if you check out the options for materials these days, they’re practically endless. High gsm card, fine card, photographic card, you name it, they’ve got it.

The day of the printer not only isn’t over, it may not yet have begun.