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Recently, I also felt the similar urge that Jonathan had, and it was to get businesses cards to make yourself look a little bit more "professional" as well as conveniently giving people your contact information rather than to wait around for them to grab a pen and a piece of paper. Yes, there's an application on the iPhone iOS system and Android-based phones (and perhaps on the Blackberry too) called Bump, in which you can exchange contact information electronically, but not everyone has a smartphone.
Since I was studying at SAIT, where much of the learning style is more practical than that of the theory-based learning in most universities, I had to take a professional communications and presentation course, and part of it was to write up a very "professional" report. So, I have decided to pay a visit to SAIT's XDOCS, a place that does book binding, business cards, and the such to get this document bound (and I had to pay extra on top of that -- quite ridiculous provided I had to pay for tuition already!).
Putting aside the fact of additional payments, I decided to inquire about their business cards. The lady that had my group document bound told me that they charge approximately $30 CAD for 250 business cards -- both in glossy and matte texture (which was not the case for the glossy, as I found that out later). Moving on from that, Jonathan whips out his Photoshop skills and sends me a very fancy and professional looking design for business cards. Jonathan decides to go for 250 cards, while I, on the other hand, being the one that is always hyped about new "toys", decide to go for 500 cards.
Moving on to a couple days later and having a good chat with the specialist guy, I pull up our fancy design for him. Being the nice guy that he is, he tells me that if I simply give him our design, he would charge us extra to resize and fit multiple copies to a page (obviously so it's more convenient for cutting and reduces on cost). So I leave and returned in approximately an hour with a 2 sets of 10 business cards perfectly fitted to a page. In about 30 minutes, he was able to whip up 750 business cards! And the best part of it was that it costs just under $50 for a matte texture (in case you were wondering, it costs $350 more for a glossy texture since they needed to run the high quality paper through a very expensive machine).
So, here it is! The long awaited business cards! There were some slight flaws, but these are very unnoticeable. Good thing Jonathan wasn't "too" picky about it
. Enjoy!~ (Jonathan's cards are not shown because I just don't like opening a box that is supposedly someone else's.)
Here, we can see the outer packaging of the box, with the sample business cards stapled to the front of the box so you know exactly what your business cards look like. The box is quite simple. As you can tell, it is folded from a pre-cut template of a box.
Obviously, out of the box, you will get your business cards, and depending on how many you ordered, the amount of business cards will fill up the box accordingly. As shown here, there is some space for the cards to move around. As I mentioned before, since the glossy texture costs approximately $400, we decided to stick with a more matte texture at $50. This was for a total of 750 business cards.
Here's a simple comparison of our design of the front and back. We decided not to make it overly fancy, even though looks may attract people's eyes. The front has our information, while the back is plain white. Yes, I know, it looks kind of boring, but "professionals" are not looking at how fancy you can make your card.
I would have to say that the color and print quality is decent enough to catch somebody's eyes. It's not perfect, but from far, it looks alright. The color printing may look slightly fussy when looking at it very closely.
Here is a color and text comparison. Again, in the text, if you look closely enough, it is somewhat fussy.
As we can see here, their cutting skills are not the best. However, you will usually be handing out one business card to the person, and they are not going to go home and measure out exactly the size of your business card to determine whether you are professionally fit for a job or not, so I am not overly concerned in this aspect. However, I have left a very slim white line when creating a set of 10, with 5 in each column. In some business cards, you can tell that their cutting was not perfect since you can see the white line, but again, you will have to look very closely in order to see it.
This post has been edited by prestonyuen: 10 December 2010 - 12:19 AM
Way to go Preston!
