I needed a logo and business card, but I am not a designer, so I tried 2 different web based logo design companies. I was not impressed with the designs that either company came up with, so I tried it on my own.
Since I am not a designer I am posting my most recent designs here to get some feedback. Please let me know what you like and don't like and what I can do to improve either the logo or business card.
Regarding using an image, I really tried to incorporate one or more but kept running into the same problem - if I use a picture of a football player the brides will think I'm a sports shooter and may not use me, if I use a bride the seniors won't use me, if I show super 8 film the people looking for HD video might not be interested, etc, etc, etc, . . . and if I use enought pictures to represent everything I do it will be cluttered and no single picture will have have a strong impact. I chose to not use any image so I would not box myself in. Do others think this is a mistake?
No, you did the right thing for your business card, now for marketing stratagy and placing an ad, THEN you want to be more specific in the sense that if you are advertising in a wedding mag, then don't put any of your sports photos in the ad, and such, but you could mention it with the text as long as it doesnt clutter it.
Your card has a professional look and looks more like a corporate style which i like and I think is effective. And think about where all of your business cards that you obtained from others are. Theyre not always on you, do we keep them? Do we use them to refer people to? Sometimes we do, sometimes we dont. Most often, we will treat business cards as others treat ours, so think about that. A lesson my friend who majored in marketing taught me. Hope that helps.
I don't understand the pre-occupation with using pictures on a business card. It is not only completely overdone, but the pictures are so small as not to have any impact. It just clutters the card. Especially it grinds my gears when people put three or four pictures on the back of a 2.5 inch business card. Come on people!
I use 3 images on my business card, and am not too concerned about marketing to the right group. If I have a kid's shot on the card with two wedding images, it just shows some versatility. Bottom line, I want a positive emotional reaction to the card and images are your best bet for that. If someone has the greatest non-image card, sure, it can look cool, but will mostly likely not give the viewer an emotional reaction the way a very good picture will. I don't know, maybe that's the photojournalist in me speaking. My 2 cents.
Thanks for the caution regarding the use of black. I understand that if I design in CMYK not RGB and use the following values for black: C60, M40, Y40, K100, instead of just K100, that the black should reproduce dark and rich like I see on screen. Have you tried this and did it solve the black problem for you?
I used a black background on my card, too, and it turned out great. I created the design in Adobe Illustrator and converted everything by using the trace function. When you have the cards printed, request a full bleed to be sure the black background goes all the way to the edges of the card. I use 4colorprint.com for mine. I was very pleased with pricing and quality.
Great cards, btw. The only thing I noticed was that the pic/logo in between the words "Life" and "Clips" on the front side of the card is slightly off center with the bottom 3 descriptives. I realize this is due to the difference in the number of letters of each word. Maybe you could resize the entire line somewhat to make it set differently on the card. It may just be me, my eye gets drawn to those types of things...
I used a black background for a card I designed once and it turned out fine. I submitted in CMYK where K=100, I don't think I used the 60/40/40 model, but I could see how it might help as CMYK is subtractive, so adding more combinations of CMY will yield a truer black.
To me it seems more about the printer being able to reproduce the blacks you see on the screen. I sent the cards off to a cheap online printing service and they came out just fine.
I think you'll find if you print on a glossy card the blacks will seem truer than if you print on a card with matte finish. That goes against intuition (because a matte finish card absorbs more light and should thus appear darker, however the light gets scattered more), but in my experience I've found it to be true.
lcoleman wrote:
Thanks for the caution regarding the use of black. I understand that if I design in CMYK not RGB and use the following values for black: C60, M40, Y40, K100, instead of just K100, that the black should reproduce dark and rich like I see on screen. Have you tried this and did it solve the black problem for you?
Icoleman,
I had talks with my printer when I first designed my card and those were the exact values he gave me for black. He said those values produce the finest rich black. It seems 'black' can be more complex than I thought.
