Posts Tagged design

Bad Business Card Example

Have you ever seen a Jackson Pollock business card? Sounds interesting, right?  Well it’s not.  The Pollock card is actually the bane of business card design, and unfortunately, it’s one of the most common designs you’ll come across.

So why do I call it the Pollock card?  Because like a Pollock painting, the elements are strewn about with utter disregard to form or function.  On cards like these, you’ll often see the company name in the middle with various other elements thrown without reason into the four corners of the card, with other info center-aligned under the company name. Small business owners around the country are compromising their image without even knowing it.

The good news is that there are a few simple steps you can take to vastly improve the quality of your small business’ business cards.

The dangers of the Jackson Pollock business card

Eye Movement Across the Bad Example

One of the primary goals for any design is to make the content easy for the viewer to absorb. This can be accomplished through alignment, contrast, and spatial relationship, among other things.  These techniques help the viewer’s eye move quickly across the content and quickly grasp what you’re trying to say.

The Pollock Card, however, disregards these techniques, leaving a difficult mess for the viewer’s eye to navigate.

A better approach to business card design

Using the principles of alignment, contrast, repetition, and relationship, our previously unorganized card has become much easier to read.  Let’s take a look at how each principle applies to this business card:

Better Example

• Alignment — Death to center-aligned text!  By aligning all the text to the left and along the blue box, the reader’s eye now flows smoothly over each point of copy. The problem with center alignment is that there is no consistent edge for the eye to follow, making quick reading difficult.  Always think twice before using center-aligned text for any reason.
• Contrast —While all the type looks blandly identical in the Pollock card, our revised business card uses contrasting type weights and styles to distinguish various types of information.  A consistent look is maintained by using varying weights and styles of the same typeface.  This effect can also be achieve through varying color, typeface, size, or texture.
• Repetition—The white tick marks in the field of blue create visual reference points for each group of information.  Additionally, they pull the eye up and down the various points of information and keep the eye from straying away.
• Relationship—The evil version of our business card forces the eye to move all around the world looking for relevant data, but simply by grouping together related pieces of information, our new layout helps the reader quickly understand the organization of the layout.

Eye Movement Across the Better Example

Your business card is an integral part of your small business marking, and by applying these basic principles you can improve the quality of your design many times over.