Want to make a great first impression? Then you need fantastic business cards.

I am not talking about some generic, text filled and BORING business card – like every other company out there has. No, what you need is a personalised and visually interesting business card that people want to take from you.

To do that you will need a custom business card design made up. If you use a ‘design builder’ built in to a website, you will end up being able to choose between only a handful of designs…the end result being you have yet another generic business card that could be used for any business – because that’s their purpose!

First of all, it does not need to be an expensive process. In fact the actual cost of printed custom designed business cards is fairly cheap – about £10-£30 for 250 depending on where you go and what type of business cards you have printed up.

Most people assume that a custom design to actually go on to these business cards is going to cost the earth. Yet that’s not true! For a fairly small one off cost you can have your very own design that you can use again and again for years to come.

To make matters simple I offer a selection of services for creating the design, and let you use whatever printing company you desire. Of course if you like I can suggest a company for you that I use, and even do the entire service for you, having the cards shipped straight to your address with no effort from you. It all depends on the service you are after and on your technical skills.

Chose below if you would like 1 sided or 2 sided business cards, and if you would like my very own ‘Effortless Business Card’ options below. Continue reading further down the page to find out more great reasons to having a custom made business card!

Ordering Custom Designed Business Cards

Why Have A Custom Business Card?

You might have already seen my business card, it may even be the very thing that brought you to this website. If so then you can definitely see the power you gain by having a business card that makes an impact!

For those of you who haven’t yet seen it, there are three business cards below. One is mine and the other two are alternatives I could of gone with. Try to guess which is the one I use.

If you have already seen my business card then try to identify all the points that make it different to the other two.

I’m pretty sure most of you can guess with the design I went with!

Of course the third one is the most visually interesting and appealing, but why?

Business Card 1 – This is an incredibly generic and plain boring business card, yet the majority of companies out there will use this style of card. Do you seriously think that you are going to really want to have a business card like this in your wallet? Or that it is going to catch your eye if it manages to even stay in there for five minutes.

Although the text is coloured in places, it uses the plain fonts Times New Roman and Arial. It doesn’t catch the eye at all, let alone draw you in. Plus the total omission of any kind of company branding or logo means it could belong to any company, anywhere, doing anything. Avoid business cards like this.

Business Card 2 – Better, but not great. It is of a vertical layout, which is rarer than the traditional horizontal layout. This doesn’t mean you need a layout like this, just mine is so it would of looked odd if both other examples were not!

The fonts again are fairly standard, but the inclusion of a company logo instantly associates it with your company from just a simple glance. Far from perfect, this logo is certainly a step in the right direction though and will stand out from the mass of business cards out there.

Business Card 3 – My actual business card. As you can see there are major differences between this one and the one before it, and it is nothing like the first example.

A high contrast yet coherent colour scheme makes the business card easy to read yet very interesting to look at. It also has a very unique feel to it, you can almost guarantee nobody will have another business card in their wallet like yours!

The fonts are custom, and are not available by default on a computer so stand out a little bit more. In addition the whole style of the business card is tailored to stand out from the crowd and draw the eye in by being something unusual.

Finally the company name and logo are pride of place, in the top and middle of the business card respectively. They are also the largest things by far on there. This is done so that with the slightest glance someone can instantly see both of these things and will associate the logo with the company name, and will instantly be reminded of your company every time they should happen to glance in to their wallet.

Digitisation

While ‘digitisation’ may sound like a fancy word, all it really means is ‘make digital’. This allows you to use this digital version of your business card for printing time and time again.

I will provide you with high quality and editable versions of your image. This comes with the added advantage that you will then have a .psd version of the image, allowing you to do a lot more than you could with a traditional image file!

You will also be supplied with .jpg and .png versions of your business card, however, these files are not suitable for large scale printing purposes. They will work fine on traditional office printers, but if you are having business cards made up or shop signs, then they need to be vector images in CMYK colour mode. Don’t worry if that makes no sense at all, just remember that .jpg, .png and .gif formats do not work for these purposes.

The File Formats

.jpg – The traditional and most commonly used image format. Perfect for web use, however transparency is not supported. Supplied for maximum compatibility, as .png formats should generally be used if possible.

.png – Pronounced ‘ping’, this format is used less frequently than .jpg files, it was created as an improvement on the .gif file format. .png files support transparency and so are perfect for using over coloured areas such as headers on web pages.

.psd – The advantage to a .psd version of your logo is that you can edit it with much better results, and each part of the logo will be on it’s own separate layer – perfect if it needs to be changed or modified later.

.ai – This image format is different from traditional images, and even .psd files, as it is a vector image format. As mentioned above, colour printing for things like business cards, letter heads, shop banners, van signage etc all require vector images in CMYK format.