New Business Cards

Every little while, just to keep your hand in and your design talents sharp, it's wise to reinvent your own marketing. I review and revise my own identity systems (letterhead, logos, business cards, envelopes, etc.) every six months to a year. You don't have to do it that often, but it's a pleasant way to spend a free afternoon designing and illustrating.

I've actually gone so far, in the past, as to invent phoney bands and fictional design firms so that I could create an identity system for them. It's quite fun, really, and it does keep your skills sharp.

This afternoon I made a new set of business cards versions, to reflect my own changing priorities and needs at this time. Since I am writing music on commission now, and since I am also wanting to restart my photography and graphic design career, post-surgery, I thought it was a good time.

I started by playing with my photography business card. The background illustration is a grayscale photograph of mine made in the past few days. The image is screened back so that the type stands out in high contrast in front, without being drowned out by the photo.

I made two versions of this photography card, the only difference being in the choice of typefaces. The first version uses some more obscure and decorative fonts, for a retro Art Deco look. After completing that version, I wondered if the typefaces would be too challenging for some folks, so I redid the card using more plain and legible typefaces.

(Note: I've obscured my cell-phone number here, as I don't intentionally put that out on the internet; although my email is open news, so I left that in.)





The next card I made was a card advertising music composition. I began by playing around with ideas using clip art with musical notation to accompany the text. That seemed a little boring, though, so I then thought about using my own musical scores for the art. Regardless, my thinking for the design of a music business card was not very different from these pjhoto business cards.

But then I had an inspiration. I have used Scrabble tiles in the past to make messages, words, short phrases, haiku, etc., then photographed them to make a design image or illustration. It's a fun way of playing with handmade typesetting; the look and feel of the wooden letter tiles has its own beauty.

So I got the inspiration to make the music card out of a Scrabble-tile illustration. I chose the phrase "Words and Music" and my name for the card, and laid them out using tiles. I made a background out of the very music and words I am writing right now for the new music commission. I made an arrangement of notebooks, writings, blank score paper, and Scrabble tiles. Then I photographed it in color and B&W, to get enough material to work with in Photoshop. I photographed with enough margin to be able to crop and edit the edges to make the business-card-sized illustration. A standard business card size 3.5 x 2 inches in dimension.




I added the phone number by laying out blank Scrabble tiles, using their blank backs, then typesetting the numbers onto the blank tiles in Photoshop. Since Scrabble tiles use a generic sans-serif font, I used Helvetica for the numbers.



Then I copied the phone number art into the business card art, and fused them together in Photoshop, using layers. I intended the numbers to be smaller than the words on the image, so I scaled this whole image down once it was made, before inserting it into the business card art.

The blank card-stock paper I was using to print these new business cards is a light tan parchment in appearance, so I color-shifted the entire artwork towards sepia, using the Color Balance dialog box in Photoshop. Sepia is a toned effect I use often for my monochrome photographic prints, and used here it is a complimentary color to the card-stock, giving an overall effect of being contemporary yet also somewhat classically antiqued, like an old photograph. I think the end result is rather pleasing.



Last, I thought to use the back of this business card to provide more detailed contact information, laid out more clearly, as pure type. The front of the card is after all an artistic illustration, so the back can be just type, with all the relevant data laid out very simply.



So, that was an afternoon of design play. I like the results, especially the music composition card. To do it as an illustrated art-card was a genuinely useful but of inspiration. This is the sort of design idea that makes your work stand out and be memorable: it's unique, customized, and different from the norm.

Next, I'll use this or a similar idea to make flyers, letterhead, and other materials for a music composition identity system. Later for that.

The Scrabble Bowl

I was at the local dollar store (one of those discount stores which specialize in overstock, remainders, etc., all priced at a dollar) and I saw a book of puzzles based on the board game Scrabble. Scrabble is one of my favorite games, a word game, a crossword puzzle game. The most cutthroat game of Scrabble that I ever played was a three-way game played when I was studying gamelan in Java, Indonesia; one afternoon we played, allowing words from the languages we all had in common, English, Dutch, Indonesian, and Javanese; I lost, badly, but it was a real exciting game.

I had the idea to pay a bit of artistic homage to Scrabble, so I picked up a couple of the puzzle books and brought them home, to make a papier-maché art bowl.



Each page of the book has a Scrabble board image with some words filled in, and clues to finish the puzzle.

Now, I normally highly revere the published book. I would never cut one up or tear it apart. Such feelings have had nearly the force of a taboo in my life, before. I have thought about participating in a "hurt book" library art-book show such as that which has been sponsored in past by the San Francisco Public Library. Hurt books are books that have been damaged by accident, or through the malice or idiocy of some borrower, and when reacquired by the library are often damaged beyond repair, no longer able to be circulated. In hurt book art shows I have seen, the library has given damaged or nearly destroyed books to artists, who have then sculpted them, altered them, made them into beautiful art pieces. Some art pieces show as much reverence for the physical fact of a published book as I often feel; others are more whimsical, others abstract.

To make this Scrabble bowl, I cut up an entire thrift-store Scrabble puzzle book and used the game-board pages to make the bowl. Since I normally revere the printed book, even one as cheap and throw-away as this one, it took me a few moments to talk myself into cutting it up. Call it practice for getting past a personal taboo: if a destroyed book were in fact given to me in future, I could more easily make it into sculpture. The idea of book-sculpture appeals to me, and if such an opportunity appeared, I would make use of it. Eventually, we always make art out of things we love.



This papier-maché bowl made from the thrift-store Scrabble puzzle book had some challenges. The paper is as thin as newsprint, although it is white instead of unbleached newsprint. I had to use the entire book to make enough thickness of layers to make the bowl sturdy enough when dried. There are 4 or 5 layers of paper throughout this bowl, from edge to base. The paper tore easily when wet, so I had to be careful at times when laying out the sheets in the mold. Some tore anyway. But I got into making patterns with the layout, and I like the result, which is both chaotic and regular in image and form. I could have used more glue in the glue-water matrix for making the bowl, as some of the outer layers of the bowl's base were loose when I removed the bowl from the mold, while it was still slightly wet. I was able to tack them down, though, with more matrix, and they re-attached themselves fairly well as the bowl dried.



When I find an old Scrabble game at a thrift store, if it only costs a dollar or two, I pick it up. I like to use the wooden letter tiles from the game to make poems and other little phrases that I lay out, then take photos, the way some people play with magnetic letters to make poems on their refrigerators. For example:




So I pulled out one set of letter tiles from one of my surplus Scrabble games and filled up the bowl. I might add another set to the bowl, eventually.



It will be fun to have this Scrabble bowl full of tiles sitting around on hand, so I can put together a poem or phrase anytime I feel like it, in future. And the bowl itself could become quite the conversation piece, if placed out where guests might notice it, say, in the living room. Anybody who likes Scrabble or word-games might enjoy playing around with this bowl and its contents.

At the thrift store there were also puzzle books of Sudoku and similar word and number games. A Sudoko bowl might also be interesting to make in papier-maché, as an experiment. Who knows, this might be the start of a series.