nclud is a creative web design agency bringing the web together through unique, stylish, and usable designs.

Six most uniquely creative business cards of SXSWi 2007

We all love the web, but are often given the pleasure or forced into designing outside that medium (depending how you look at it). Brand logos and business cards are of the most common tasks given to the traditional web designer – right or wrong, amazing things can come from the truly creative. At nclud, we realize and highly value the importance of a creative brand and ensuring that creativity transcends throughout. When you are away from the computer and at an event like SXSW, or any event for that matter, your business card becomes your creative identity. We often spend so much time on our websites and online portfolios we ignore the obvious. We, nclud, put a lot of time and effort into our cards; knowing that we are a creative agency, we had to ensure that everything we did screamed creativity! So, asking for and trading business cards were much more than simply a networking initiative -- it was a learning and design exploration experience.

Of the hundreds of the business cards we collected during SXSWi, we thought it would be fun to highlight the six that really stood out and caught our attention. Not that any are better designed or more effective than another – these are simply our favorite.

1. Our favorite comes from meetro. It is a cleverly obvious design and well implemented theme playing off their name which is similar to “metro”. So what did they do, they made their business card resemble that of a metro card. It got us thinking and peaked our interest; which should be all of our goals!

   

   

2. Runner up has to go to Steve Smith of Ordered List. He has a simple card that is well designed with a twist – an elegant cut-out of his logo that is well placed to ensure it looks amazing horizontally and vertically. It is its simplicity and style that keeps it standing out among the crowd.

   

   

3. Many will disagree with our third choice – it is seemingly lazy and cheap but its lack of creativity makes it creatively humorous. David of openthewindow.net used a deck of cards and a sharpie for this business card; beats the hell out of the typical “I forgot to bring cards” excuse. His presentation and humorous demeanor is the perfect compliment to his inexpensive idea. There were a few of these “let me write my name on something random and call it a card” ideas floating around, but David’s wins best-in-show for this category. I’d also like to point out that every card at the conference had the same dimensions, keeping any from physically standing out when put together in a stack – the deck of cards card with its unique dimensions helps again with the pop factor.

   

   

4. An obvious choice for being apart of such a list is Mr. Jason Santa Maria – whose ability to be so creative across such diverse mediums never stops to amaze me. His card is not overwhelmed with color or printed on an expensive satin matte with rounded corners. It is simple, elegant and traditional while still being professional and most important, personable. This would be our first choice, expect I suspect the concept he has works really well only for someone so established. I enjoy the fact that one of every eight cards is unique and together they make something greater that really represents “Jason”.

   

   

5. The Sidebar Creative team; such a talented network you’d expect great things and their card is no exception. The card feels like Dan Rubin’s style, but I don’t know any of them well enough to truly say that. We picked this card for its humor, professional design and team oriented verbiage. The best touch is the subtle embossing of the logos of each individual members of the group. The rounded corners and nice finish were common this year – I suspect from the popularity of print100.com (just a hunch).

   

   

6. Last but not least is Scrapblog! Their card has the same rounded corners and finish of the Sidebar Creative card, but the execution is slightly different – and for that they make our list. Creative titles like “community guy” and artistic drawings at the foot of the card that transcend to the back give it flavor that others lacked. It too has a double sided embossed feel which helps give it character. Utilizing a hot pink (a color most designers fear) helps them stand out among the crowd.

   

   

There were many great cards and we don’t proclaim to be experts in business cards – but we know what we like and we thought we’d share!

We are perfectionists (or at least we try to be) and while we love version one of our cards, the great cards we collected at SXSWi this year will prove very inspirational in our next batch.

Posted by Martin Ringlein on March 18, 2007 | Permanent Link |