Business Cards

After looking at marketing myself using my online social media, I decided to look at a more physical way of doing that. Creating some business cards will allow me to improve my rendering techniques and visual style as I will have to go through the process of designing the cards, including type which is something I don't really work with usually.
It will also help me with beginning to practice as a freelance illustrator as it is another way to display my "Brand" visually and have a form of advertising so people can find my artwork online.

Lots of artists have business cards as they are a good way to showcase your art to clients. Especially if you happen to meet someone out of the blue that could have an interest in your work, its an easy way to show them what you are all about.

At Deecon especially, having a business card on my stall will be an asset. They are something free for anyone to take and could be a way of drumming up freelance clients. People tat buy from me on the day can use those cards to find me online and people that perhaps didn't have the means to buy on the day can contact me for a sale/follow my work online. Business cards are a good way to drum up an audience. This will not only help build up my client base, but messages/requests from people who like my art could give me an indication of what my target audience is so I can produce work that is marketable to them.

To begin designing my own business card. I first looked at cards from other artists that I liked.



This card has a really bold, colour palette and the brush strokes make it look very expressive. You get a goo impression of the way the artists works from this card but not necessarily the sort of art they produce.
If I want to market myself as a freelancer, I want to have a card that has a better visual indicator of what clients should expect from me than this one has.




I really like this card. I like the colours in the font in the background. The front design also gives a good idea of the sort of art style the client can expect. I feel the style of text really suits the design aesthetic but like the last card, I think it's difficult to read.




















I also really like this card, it's really illustrate and stylised. The use of a textured paper gives a really traditional feel. This isn't what I'm producing, traditional art, but I like the idea of the material giving an impression of the work an artist produces.
I like the really small stylised text but I don't feel it works very well as a form of advertising. If you want someone to contact you, make the ways they can do that obvious, don't try and hide it.

This is the initial sort of, sketch, for a business card that I came up with.
The plan was to do it as a self portrait but the more I messed around with it the more I really didnt lke it.

I just didnt think it owuld be very appealing to people at a con because they wouldnt know who I am so why would they want my face on a card, and also,  was worried it wasnt desplaying the sort of work I produced very well, or the veriety of rendering techniques I'd learnt in the module over the year to get to this point.

This is the second design I did, and the one I got printed. I decided to, instead of creating a new image for the front of the card, reuse the images I had created so far this year as the cover. I feel this works really well. It's visually interesting and shows a variety of examples of my work.

I took the idea for my typography from the third business card design. I liked the use of colour on the text and thought it would look really interesting if the text was made up of images of my art.
I used brown for the main text and green for the accent colour because green was the most stand out colour in my name and the brown was colour dropped from my ivy paintin gas I knew it would go with the green (same painting) and the plain brown colour provided a nice base colour that blended with the imagery on my card.

The font I decided to go with was a sans serif because the absence of flourishes makes the font easier to read. I also laid out my type in a box to mirror the boxy font I used as well as the rectangular layout of my art on the front of the card.

Choosing how my cards were printed was also a very important process. Expert rendering of the physical card was important because its an integral part of how my work is viewed and displayed.

Because I don't have a printer, I decided to go with an online printing service. I had to be very careful about the options I chose because it wouldn't be me controlling the printing process.

In the end I went with a heavy card stock 300gsm and a matte paper. I really like the matte finish because I feel that it just looks and feels much sleeker and durable than gloss would have done. That and this way the printed images are not overpowered by any shine on the card.