The business cards I spoke about in a previous post have arrived.  Actually they arrived a couple of weeks ago, just after I had posted about the design we were going to use for them.  However, I never had the time to sit down and write about them in detail.  The design is as you can see on the left.  I would recommend clicking on the link and taking a look at them in more detail.  James did a magnificent job on the design, which is very effective at the same time as being uncluttered and easy on the eye. I can’t recommend James’s company enough if you’re looking for some design or web work.

The cards were printed by OvernightPrints.de who also have a presence in a bunch of European countries and the US.  Their rates are very reasonable and the quality is better than I had expected for the cost.  I think I mentioned it before, but I’m going to re-work the design of this site soon to include the new logo.  In addition to that, I’ll be paring back the CSS to make it lighter.  The style sheet alone weighs in at 30Kb for this site, and it isn’t totally compatible with all browsers.  It works, but some sites show it slightly mangled at the top.  So, its time to pare it back and throw out a load of that shit that has been hanging around for a long time.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I had won some business cards from Janko Jovanovic and that I was having James design them.  Well, it didn’t work out as I was expecting (through no fault of Janko I should add) and they wanted to charge me $39.50 to send them to Germany.  For that price I could have had twice the quantity printed here in Germany, and shipped overnight, individually wrapped and carried by a thousand camels.  It pissed me off a bit that we (James) had gone to all that work for naught, so I went and ordered the cards from Overnight Prints anyway.  I just read an email from them that they had been printed already and are on the way, and UPS tells me that they are in Kirchheim which isn’t that far from here.  In fact, they’ll get here on Monday at around 10am.  Living in Germany is wonderful from that perspective… I KNOW when UPS are going to get here!)

So, here’s what they look like. On the left you can see the front of the card.  Per James’s recommendation, we went minimalist on the front.  Only the salient information is visible, and the design is simple and easy to read.  The colour swapping of my surname is clever, and the overall effect is professional and very cool.  The front is going to be printed without a gloss coating.  The text at the bottom that you can’t properly read says “High-end web and application development”, which is of course exactly what I do.

The back however is a different kettle of fish.  James originally thought that some of Leonardo daVinci’s drawings would be good here, but then came up with some very basic and really effective BASIC code :
10 CLS
20 PRINT “DAVEWHITE.NET”
30 GOTO 10
RUN_

I liked that quite a bit, but it wasn’t modern enough, so I changed it into a C# routine that would print the website and email address one hundred times. You can see that on the right, and its going to look lovely on the card.  The back is bring glossed, and as it is a vibrant red colour graduation it should look fantastic.  Kudos and massive thanks to James for his great designs!

Along with everything else, James went and built multi-colour variations for me as well as some mini icons.  There are print (CMYK) and screen (RGB) versions of each so I’m going to freshen the look of this site soon.  This design is quite heavy and dark, so I’m going to strip out some of the dross.  For example, the titles of the posts are heading level three (<h3>), but should really be heading level 2 (<h2>).  I also want to make this design more accessible and then release it as a theme for BlogEngine.Net.

A couple of weeks ago I won some business cards on a blog I read called Janko at Warp Speed.  Janko is a developer with a BlogEngine.Net installation that he blogs from, typically on the subject of web design. The cards I won are professionally printed and to my own specifications.  Naturally, I had James do the design work, and he has come back with some intriguing design work for the back of the card.  The front is still a mystery to me, though I should be getting the results soon :-)  I’ll post the design here and then maybe a couple of photos of the finished product when they arrive.

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