Brand YOU is an ongoing series of articles about building your image. As a designer you create, redefine, and enhance brands and identities everyday. You can choose just the right typeface and signature Pantone for your clients' brands; knowing when to slap a client's logo onto the side of a bus and when to emblaze it across a bottle of hot sauce is second nature to you. But how adept are you at building your most important brand, your own?

Often the most difficult to conceptualize and make real, self-promotion and personal brand building is a challenge for designers. The Brand YOU series helps take the frustration and mystery out of building your identity and your image.

You Are Here:  Brand YOU:  Business Cards (Part 1)

See Also: Brand YOU:  Business Cards (Part 2)

In this first installment of Brand YOU we'll start out simple with Business Cards 101.

Options for the physical presentation of business cards are almost as numerous as fonts. From embossing to foil-stamping, custom folding to specialty materials like metal, plastic, special cut CD-ROMs, and even wooden cards, today's designer has a whole new palette to consider when creating her Brand YOU b.c.s. Before getting too excited about your new foil-stamped, die-cut, folding mylar b.c. with the aqueous high-gloss top-coat, let's talk about the basics.

A standard b.c. is 3.5-inches wide by 2-inches deep. It has a front, and it has a back, which is the most consistently under-utilized piece of real estate in the whole of the world. It can be black-&-white, (up to) four-color process, and/or spot color. If desired, a b.c. can bleed on all eight sides (eight?! remember the back). A b.c. can be oriented for reading horizontally or while holding the card vertically (2-inches wide by 3.5-inches deep).

The primary purposes of a b.c. are to: Identify and introduce Brand YOU to a viewer, and to provide a means of contacting the entity to which Brand YOU belongs. These are the essentials without which a b.c. fails to function as a b.c.. I've been handed b.c.s that have nothing at all on them but a person's name—no contact info, no title or line of work, nothing. Fifteen minutes and a dozen other, more descriptive b.c.s later, I had completely forgotten the line of work and significance of the person whose name stood alone in silver or gold foil on a white card. Don't make that mistake. Unless you are someone whose identity and means of contact are already universally known to your b.c.'s target palms, don't shoot yourself in the foot by trying to be gauche. Unless you are Donald Trump, and until Jason Calacanis's vision of the future comes to pass, provide a means of contact—as many means as possible—on your b.c.

The goal of a b.c. is to make it easy for someone to reach you, not difficult. Put as much of the following as possible:

• Business name (if there is one)

• Your name

• Your title

• A phone number (or two)

• A fax number

• A mailing address (more on that in another installment of Brand YOU)

• Your e-mail address (never use a free service; more about that in another installment of Brand YOU)

• The URL of every—and only—website that reinforces Brand YOU (the entire content of every URL listed may be considered by a prospective client when considering whether to hire you)

If I were doing a new b.c. for Brand ME, focused specifically on my creative training and consulting services, I would include the following:

• Business name: [None, as I train and consult under my own name]

• Your name: Pariah S. Burke

• Your title: Trainer & Consultant: Graphic and Creative Systems, Software, and Methodologies

• A phone number: 503.422.7499

• A fax number: [Withheld for publication on this blog]

• A mailing address: [Withheld for publication on this blog]

• Your e-mail address: brandyou040504@iampariah.com

• URLs:
  Portfolio: http://portfolio.iampariah.com
  The Design Weblog: http://design.weblogsinc.com
  The Magazine Design Weblog: http://magazinedesign.weblogsinc.com
  Graphic Design Resource Group:
  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/graphic_design/
  Quark vs. InDesign: http://quark.iampariah.com

Incidentally, I would probably put all but the first of my URLs on the back of the b.c. rather than crowd them onto the front with everything else. I would likely also include on the back of my b.c. the products and technologies in which I train and consult—Photoshop, ImageReady, InDesign, InCopy, PageMaker, Quark, Illustrator, Acrobat, color management, typography, graphic design, publishing, and accessible PDFs. The more information you can provide about Brand YOU, who it is, what it does, without impacting the legibility of your b.c., the better.

Other things you should have on your b.c.:

• A tag line

• Your line of work, if not clearly identified by your business name, title, or tagline

• (Optional) Any accreditations you've earned (i.e. "Adobe Certified Expert, Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Acrobat")

• If you speak or work in more than one language, something that conveys that (e.g. "Se habla espanol" or the information from front of your card duplicated on the back in Japanese)

A b.c. is the first—and often only—advertising about Brand YOU to which a prospect will be exposed. At classes and speeches I present I constantly hear from new designers: "A b.c. isn't that important. I'll always be there to fill in what my business card doesn't. My business card is just a way to open the door; talking to the prospect will get my foot into it." Just like I tell them: don't be naïve. When a prospective client is considering hiring someone in your field, you won't be around. Decisions to hire vendors don't occur during the initial meeting; they happen later, after the vendor has gone. Often times the prospect will forget everything about you the moment you walk away; if what you talked about isn't reinforced in some way by that b.c. in the prospect's pocket—likely one of a dozen b.c.s, by the way—then she still won't remember you. She'll disca