Designing business cards (I)

Once you start a business or project, strategic marketing is the key. You need a PR expert, an excellent, not good, excellent graphics designer who understands excellent design, a marketing guru with excellent understanding of trends and competition, an accountant and an objective advisor to cut back losses and teach you how to cope with bankruptcy.

Luckily for me, my online world is mostly free from those burdens. I have taken it upon myself though to promote the journalism/blogging I and my friends do on {Muslimness}. I promised them leaflets and have begun with business cards.

I used Microsoft Office '08 for Mac to make this in less than half an hour - I was being fussy.

Step one, throw together a template; the left box lays out where I want title, links and slogan. The Muslimness title and boxes on the right are the content to the card.

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I'm not designing anything fancy or for a client. I threw around the floating text and objects - oh, I made those network icons too which I'd say is the only decent skill shown here, hamdulillah - the rest is cheating.

The final card is fairly balanced and aesthetically pleasing, although the bottom right is a bit 'ooh-er'. That's what I was going for, 'ooh-er'. Check for mistakes, print a test page on 180gsm card (not too thick or flimsy). Test page passed. To the printing press!

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Scaled, repeated and printed onto thicker handmade card. As said before, they are for my own work so creative exploitation is a given. I'll take a snap of the final thing and show off later insha'Allaah.

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I used the phrase 'blow away' on it, think anyone will tell on me?

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