Getting Personalized Business Cards
While you may not yet be in the position to start a photography business (and neither am I), there are two major benefits to having your own personalized business cards:
- The cards are a great way to spread the word about your site to your family and friends;
- They give you the opportunity to easily distribute your contact information to people you wish to photograph when out in public. The cards give them a way to get in touch with you, so that you can get them a copy of the shots that you took.
Wanting to take advantage of both of these benefits, I sought out to have my own cards made earlier this week. Below are some tips that I thought I would pass along from my experience.
I first started by looking (and fumbling) through a few online sites. After wrestling with Vista Print and their website for a few hours, I finally created the cards that I wanted, but they were going to cost ~$60 for a quantity of 250, and it would take at least a week to get them.
The next morning, I discovered that I could email a MS Office document to Staples, and await a phone call to discuss the details, and place my order. For me, this was a far better alternative. It gave me the opportunity to create the layout that I wanted, in a program (MS Powerpoint) that I was comfortable with. This option cost me less than $50 for 200 cards, and I got them in 3 hours.
If you choose to go the Staples route:
- Open a blank presentation and change the dimensions to 3.5″ for the width and 2″ for the height.
- Then, edit the slide to look exactly how you want the card to look.
- I recommend keeping it simple. As you can see in the above picture, all I added was a photograph, my name, my url, and my email address. I even went as far as to create a second slide that was used for the back of the card (see below), that again had my name and url, as well as a self portrait.
The only thing that I would change, when and if I do this again, is to pick a photograph that will not blend into the background color of the card. In this case, the white clouds seem to get lost in the white background.
