How I Created My Business Card!

Hi there! How’s it going? :D

Recently, just for convenience and for fun, I created a business card for myself. I love designing, sketching, and any other artsy projects, so this wasn’t particularly challenging but it did take me a long time.

I used Pages by Apple to design this, although my digital art geek friends probably would have suggested Photoshop. I love the properties Photoshop has, but the simplicity of Pages was what attracted me to use it.

Besides, I am still a newbie to PS, so it would probably take me even longer to create this masterpiece I am about to show you.

TADA!!!

Process

First, I had to figure out how my card should be oriented direction-wise. I decided to make the card vertical because, as business cards are often horizontal, vertical cards are unexpected and more special to keep.

Or maybe it’s just me. As a hobby I collect cool business cards.

I put all my info into a text-box, so it would be easier to move them around. I then chose a font for my contact info and a different font for my name because, from experience, I knew that these tiny details make a huge difference. Plus, the point of a business card is that whoever receives it will keep it and remember me. LOL.

I utilized a cute font, Heiti SC, for my contact info because this is generally the most boring part of a business card, and I wanted to enjoy “reading” it when I look at my card. The all-capital-letters font, Trajan Pro, was used for my name and title, since it is a powerful font and it makes a statement.

I added tiny Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Sina Weibo symbols because they made the card more colourful. A lot of time was spent on these itty-bitty pictures, as I had to format them so they all had the same size and same distance away from each other. I had a slight difficulty in the beginning where the logos kept on running away from my mouse, until I realized that I had to turn “text wrap” off. Oops.

I googled a picture of a crown to top it off. (haha get it?) With plenty of restrictions I went out to find the ideal crown in the great crater of the search engine. My rules for the crown were: 2-dimentional, yellow, 5 pointy parts were ideal but any odd number could work, not too detailed, not too simple, not too long, not too wide, not too flashy, and that it has a transparent background. This was the most time-consuming part of the design as I never found the exact crown that I had in mind, but I did manage to crop a similar image to make it perfect.

I left this giant space in the center because it looked cleaner and, in the future, I can also sign my signature here.

I chose five of my favourite pictures to put on the back.

You can actually see my personality through the design. I made it rather symmetrical because I am an organized person, while the icons show my fun side, and the font Trajan Pro represents my spontaneous side.

My cards on display.

Feel free to take ideas from my creation! Ask me for pointers if you need help and let me know if there are any improvements I should make. I truly don’t mind and I, in fact, would appreciate it!

Have fun over the long weekend!

Ariel Jingjing Cao

~ muah <3 ~

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