Business cards are tricky things. You meet people, exchange cards and wonder if it will be responded to.
The conventional wisdom is also to put as much information as possible onto the card so that the individual has no excuse not to be able to get in contact including but not limited to telephone number (with or without international dialling codes), fax number, pager number, web site, email address, street address, their name, their company name, their position in the corporate hierarchy, some blurb about what the company does, a logo. How about a small thumbnail of the holder? How about a pithy joke witty remark on the reverse. And all in colour.
That’s an awful lot of data to cram onto a small card. In today’s digital world, how many people will use a pager? How many people will write a letter? How much of the writing on these cards could be replaced with “whitespace”?
We’re a small company. I mean, there’s only two of us at the moment. We’re also “Bedouin” by necessity (as well as by plan). We don’t have anyone available to answer telephone queries. In fact, with the exception of some official paperwork, we’re entirely virtual. You want to speak to me? Email me and ask for my VOIP line. Or we can meet in person. Even if we grow much larger, I don’t see much point in greatly increasing the amount of data on the card.
Distilling the essence of a business card is what we did. At the end of the day, Infurious is a brand and we want to get the name out there. Hence our business cards reflect that. It should provide you with just enough “data” to find out some “information”.
That’s not to say that the approach wasn’t met with some resistance especially from our friends. But the first public test was certainly interesting and the search referrals in the website log files were just as interesting. Provide people with the most basic of information and they will find you. Google is your friend.
Anyway, I’ve waxed on long enough without actually showing anyone the card. You can see it here:
The reverse is plain white (because you may want to scribble a note on it). We’ve had some very good reactions (Wow, very minimalist and avant-garde!) as well as some not entirely positive ones (But what if I want to phone you?) What do you think? Do you think that’s entirely enough information for a startup to provide on their business card?