February 19, 2011
Business cards and business card holder
Business card holders are designed to take the storage and display of business cards to the next level – instead of having tatty piles, or bent corners from storage in pockets, or in sides of bags. No more problems with locating your business cards on a busy stand. Instead you can display and share your cards in chic units designed to maximise the attention lavished on your cards. Display units are usually made of clear or plain plastics. Pocket holders are more varied – and can be made of most elegant materials – brushed steel, leather, or other materials – the most important element again, is the ease of use and ability to remove business cards easily.
Whether you’re designing a business card for personal use, or professional use, you should always consider the information that you need to include in them. Pare it down to bare essentials if you have too much, or consider printing auxiliary information on the back of the card. Your company or personal logo should be prominent on one or both sides. The design itself should be clean and easy to read – fancy fonts should be limited to readable styles so that your card is legible – you should also be aware that some people consider flowery scripts in detrimental ways to what may be a completely different message that you want to provide. Readability aside, the font should fit comfortably on the page, and may or may not tie into your logo, depending on your company’s guidelines on business cards. But how do you know what to include on the front and what do you include on the back?
Primary information on your business card is whatever you need to provide in conjunction with your job – so your desk information, such as your extension, your email address, and other contact details. If your job title is pertinent to whatever you’re sharing, you should share that too. In these cases, you may not want to share anything on the back of your cards – instead you may find that you can write information like personal email addresses, twitter or Facebook usernames, or other information, and you can tailor it to your recipients. In the case of personal business cards – you should consider making sure that all of your personal and visible contact information, including and not limited to your blog url, personal website or portfolio/photography site, links to any social networking projects you use or are part of and if you feel it is necessary, your mobile phone number. Most experts do not recommend sharing your home phone number or address on persona business cards, but the choice is yours.
While business card holders contain some cards, you should always keep spares in the box that they arrived in, on your person – on a successful night, the last thing you want to do is run out of business cards to hand out, and you should never assume that the amount you’re carrying with you will last long enough to create a larger buss about your business. Personal business card holders are designed to be used in conjunction with hidden stores of cards. Whether you keep them in the same pocket or another pocket and keep refilling, or draw from your box and keep your business card holder ones as spare, you will always find that the ones in your pockets are kept clean and safe
Most business card storage and display units are designed to be both slim line and functional. Most are made of moulded plastic, though others may be made of premium materials, depending on the statement that the end user wants to make. Most however are made of plastic and feature some form of prop mechanism (to stand on a desk), link up mechanism (to join two or more units), and more. These display units ensure that your business cards are displayed prominently – there is no distraction due to the design of your cards. Business card holders that impede or damage cards on removal are also less than desirable, so you should always ensure that there is no dust, dirt, grit or other foreign bodies in the holder, that they haven’t become warped or damaged in storage and that they perform their function without falling over, coming apart or otherwise failing to remain unobtrusive.
Business card stands are often designed to be flat and plain, but if you work in an industry where plain is a detriment – say with children – consider decorating the stand that you’re placing your business cards on. Whether you put glitter or wrapping paper on them, design something eye catching and that serve your cards well. People working with cloth may want to ‘dress’ business cards for display, highlighting their talents as long as creating a talking point for their business cards. Plastic stands can be designed to either support or augment designs that highlight your specialities, without interfering with their function – which allows for greater creativity.
Business card holders and stands aren’t constantly in use in most cases – so when not in use, you should store them carefully. Polish and dust your holders before storage, and put your business card holder away in a drawer. You should also always ensure that any business cards you are using are current – it looks terrible if you cross out and write different information on your cards, so always update and ‘freshen’ your cards whenever things such as your extension, job title, or email address change – alternatively, consider using a ‘catch all’ email address like Gmail to allow you to keep your email mobile, but not need to update cards at every address change.
You can also use business cards to refer other people to contacts you’ve made. In some cases ‘swap meets’ are organised, and in others you may just have an idea of an ideal person for a project or colleagues need. Whether your business cards are a collection of colleagues, service people you’ve used in the past, or both, ensure you keep them in a business card holder and leverage them to ensure that your business gets the best out of them.
There are a large variety of Business Card holders available online and some excellent ones at Card Holder be sure to have a good look around before making a purchase.
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