Materials for my business card

Recently I have had a trip into the town to do some reseach for some interesting materials for my business card.

There is always the obvious option of card, but upon looking around, in a crafts shop I found a few interesting ideas.

The main basis of my favourite idea was a card made of plastic that had been cut into to look like a stencil. The idea of using a more durable material like plastic I found to be interesting, because to me this would be the sort of business card that is meant to be kept, rather than a piece of card than will just be thrown away.

I found some acetate (clear plastic) which can be put through a printer (for ease, efficiency and a professional look, rather than handwritten).

Following this I found a thicker clear plastic sheet which would be more sturdy than both the acetate mentioned earlier and the initial card.

To run an A4 sheet of this through a printer with a template of many cards to a sheet would not be too much trouble.

To make this more interesting, I would like to experiment with shape. It has been suggested to incorporate origami, but I believe this to be too complicated, and may decrease the professionalism and appear 'tacky' to some employers.

Business Card Design

Now I have started to develop business cards to send out to prospective employers.

Designs are in my sketchbook, and revolve around different layouts, formats and shapes being used.

I have considered what information I wish to share on the cards, and then decided more how to display it.

My Website

Granted, it is still in construction and at this point only contains three incomplete pages, (and it is of a very simple and minimalistic design) but I have got a website set up and online. It can be found at:

www.philgibbins.com



If I got this up and running in the near future, I could limit the information on my business card to being just the logo and the website for a clean and minimalist design.

The idea is that the website will be an online portfolio. It has not necessarily got the best graphic design, but the idea was to keep to a clean, professional minimalist colour palette and get the information across, like the apple.com website.

More images will brighten up the portfolio pages, but when the content has been uploaded various screenshots can brighten up the Home Page for example.

My Personal Logo

Before this module even started, I was in the process of making my own 'branding' to represent myself. This consists of a logo, a business card and a website.

First of all I have created this logo.



It keeps to a minimal colour-palette, sticks to the simple design feature (as recommended by my lecturer) of typos or in this case my initials, and incorporates a simple shape to add a bit of an interesting feature to it without taking away focus from the lettering.

Having now actually got to the stage where I am trying to make a business card for real, I think this may need to be re-done as a vector image rather than a high-resolution jpeg image.

Presentation

For our presentation we have come up with a few images to show rather than a powerpoint presentation.

Featured is a floorplan, a t-shirt design, various graphics and just a few ideas towards the concept as a whole. The idea is to focus on the work itself rather than have a dominant theme that overshadows the whole exhibition.

To contribute to this, i did some research on the idea of having a sculpture. The pixel art idea was favoured amongst the group, and so not to overcomplicate the sculpture we could have a simple shape or object.

The idea of a pair of 3d glasses wasthought up by another group member, and I have done a sketch to back this up.

The only problem with this is the piece being quite low and wide, it may be hard to notice and take up a lot of floorspace.