Reimundo Garcia Jr.

Since I had two shows this month, I decided to also find some new business cards to better represent myself. Business cards are great to have at opening night events when people are very interested in learning more about your work. Before I tell you what I decided to use for now, let me tell you what I decided not to use.

A few years ago, I wanted to print business cards myself. Finding the supplies is not very difficult these days. There is plenty of business card stock available at your local office supply store. I tested various different types, including matte and glossy and come in a variety of colors, including ivory and white. Printing the cards, however, is no easy task depending on how you want to print them. I wanted to put a full bleed picture on the front of my card and include some text inside the image with my contact information. After some quick photoshop work, I came up with the final image/text I wanted. The problem is that you have to be very exact to get full bleed. If your image is too large or too small, then the full bleed aspect is out of whack and you end of manually cutting certain edges off of your cards after printing. Not a great representation of your work.

Next, I decided to try having them printed online. I found out about a service called Prints Made Easy which was a relatively inexpensive website at which to have business cards printed. The interface allows you to upload your art directly and it does have the option of printing on both sides. I decided to get a one-sided card in glossy format. In fact, I ordered 3 times from them and was happy with the service and delivery. The one thing that bothered me was that I thought my image could look a lot better.

So, at this point, I was looking for a new service. I did get some cards from a service called Moo.com as a present for my birthday and was very happy with the quality as well as the MiniCards (mini-business card) format. So, I placed an order with them using a high quality image and ordered some two-sided MiniCards and two-sided full size business cards. The nice thing about ordering anything from Moo.com is that you can add more than one image to any batch. So, when ordering 50 cards, I can upload 10 pictures and get 5 cards of each picture. The quality of the end product was amazing. These cards were all printed using the MOO Classic finish, which is a laminated glossy card. For the second batch, I decided to try the MOO Green finish instead. This finish is 100% recycled and 100% bio-degradable and is uncoated. Those cards also printed very well. After some comparisons, I found that the images that had a lot more black in them printed better using the classic finish while all other images looked great with both. I would recommend either finish.

Lastly, here are some mistakes I made during this whole process that I hope you will avoid:

• Don’t put your postal address on your cards. If you move, as I did, you end up with cards that have an old address on them which confuses clients.
• Make cards with your most popular photograph on them. When people are browsing your work at a gallery, it is best to have business cards that match the work they are seeing. That way, when they get home and they look at their stack of business cards, yours will stand out because it reminds them of the photograph that was on display at the gallery.
• Use traditional fonts. When choosing the fonts, you will have a lot of crazy options including script and some other funky ones. I would stick with the most readable font. Regardless of how great it looks on your computer screen, some of the non-traditional fonts will be difficult to read once printed and will defeat the purpose of the business card.
• If printing your own, choose the clean edge business card sheets so that your cards will look more professionally printed.

Good luck with your business card hunt!