Speaking to another designer friend of mine the other day about business card design, I remembered a flickr photostream that I stumbled across whilst messing around on Google. The gallery is brimming with some of the most amazing, clever, clean, sophisticated, and downright crazy business card designs you’ll ever lay eyes upon. If you fancy stepping away from the usual double/single sided, vertical/horizontal designs that a lot of businesses use then this is the place to go to get some ideas.
Here are some of my favourites, not all of them are designs I would choose, but the creative ideas used on some of them are quite remarkable!
White on white! A plain matte card with white ink, the process used here is thermography that creates a raised ink, but the same kind of thing can be achieved using spot varnish, foil, embossing or stamping.
This is a folded design with a wax seal. I love the colour of the card and wax used, and the design feels modern, even with the ye olde wax seal.
This is a business card design of the infamous Stefan Sagmeister. He’s had a whole host of cool designs over the years, most of which are on the flickr stream. Who wouldn’t want a pop up business card!
A dog tag-esque pressed metal card is used here - something different like this is bound to leave a lasting impression on a potential client. I’m not sure I’d want to give them all away myself, they must cost a fortune!
Another metal card design. I’m not 100% sure of the manufacture method used here, but it looks pricy – but then the concept is priceless! Have you guessed what Melvin does? Yes, he’s a locksmith!
A beautifully simple design - for a restaurant I believe. Apparently if you go to the restaurant there is a machine that you can put a blank card in and stamp it for yourself! How cool is that idea? Not really practical if you are out on the road though.
I love the simplicity of this design; in fact it’s one of my favourites from the site. The brown pulpy paper is just beautiful.
All punched with tiny little holes! How do they come up with these ideas, and where do they get them “printed”?
A really cool design with a film frame type detail on the top, not sure how long that would last in your pocket. I think I’d have been more tempted to have it glued down flat.
This one’s printed on corrugated cardboard with red and silver metallic ink. Very nice indeed.
Yes, they are real hairclips!
The embossing on this one is very tasteful.
Great concept. Handmade furniture. Handmade card.
Anyway, those are just a selection of the few that caught my eye. Obviously some of them are expensive designs, and would cost a lot to produce. Others aren’t practical, and some are just plain ludicrous, but either way if someone gave you one, you’d remember it and the person who gave it to you.
Click here to go to the Flickr Photostream
Take a look for yourself, there’s nearly 900 images to browse through, and if that isn’t enough, just try a Google search for “cool business cards” - there’s plenty more sites to check out.
Anyway, that’s enough drooling for me; I should get back to work.
nice designs!