The Best of Business Card Design 9

Article by Martin Gibson – Twitter: @martingibson @embody3d – 19.11.2011

ISBN – 9781592535965

The Best of Business Card Design by Rule 29 and published by Rockport is the mother of all business card collections. Rule 29 is a strategic design firm that focuses on making creative matter for a wire array of clients and in their community.

Many see business cards as merely a communication tool, a way to exchange details. Of course to many a business card is a whole lot more. Business cards are a really a representation of you, it is an aspiration of the quality, scope, personality and agenda of your product or service. It is also a first impression and at times the only thing your customer, distributor, supplier or business partner will take away with them to represent you.

The promising thing about business card design is that if you do have a well developed logo or style pack and a sense of creativity a good business card won’t take long to develop.

The business cards featured throughout contain a variety of high quality logos, card, typefaces, colour and shape exploration and trims or cuts.

Each logo has a caption containing the design firm responsible for the design, the individual designer, the client and some contain notes which document the design programs and typefaces used.

I was very surprised that so many designers were using Adobe Indesign to design business cards; of course the majority were using Illustrator, but Indesign just seems like a bewildering choice.

Stylistically it is difficult to capture these designs in words. But if one could choose one word, it would be simplicity. While there are a few extravagant, time-consuming and detailed designs, most possess a minimalist charm often just containing the company logo and the contact details. Another really interesting theme I picked up from The Best of Business Card Design was the amount of business card collections. That is, business cards that are a series of 2 to even 8 cards that make up a whole or work in unison.

There’s not much to this title, it is ridden of any words, analysis or educational entries. But it is full of beautiful business cards in vector or photographic format. The page size is nice and large often scaling the business cards at 1:1 or even larger than life. The business cards are exhibited in a variety of layouts, frames, backgrounds and angles keeping every page a little different. I have never seen business cards of such beauty and quality before, and I have seen many many collections before.

[rating:4.5]