I thought I would take a moment to tell you about my business card. I made some interesting design decisions along the way and would like to share them with you. Take a look at the photos of my business card on the right. As it’s difficult to appreciate the cards in photo form, I’ll explain what I believe to be the important elements:

• They’re half the width of most other business cards (see the bottom photo for a comparison with a playing card)
• They don’t explain the type of magic that I do, allowing me to use it in multiple contexts
• They’re not haunted with any weird magic clip art
• They’re printed on incredibly thick and high quality card, with a satin finish
• They were printed at a specialist print shop and not a cheap highstreet printer, or even worse - my personal inkjet printer
• They sell me, not magic
• Everything about them matches my personal brand

While that isn’t really much to write home about (or probably even to write a blog post about), I wanted to show you my business cards for a reason - to explain that a business card need not conform to the traditional business card shape, size and rules. Given that most people will store your business card with lots of other cards, it’s important that yours stands out. I didn’t want to make my card stand out by making it bigger, because that would just annoy people who carry lots of business cards in their wallets. So instead, I made some bold design decisions and made it smaller than other business cards and chose a fun headline that instantly sums up what I do.

The important thing to remember is that so long as it’s got the vital information on it, your business card can be whatever size and shape you want. If you want to stand out - your promotional material needs to stand out with you.

Brand aware magicians 1 - conformists 0.