Lately, as I’ve been making networking rounds to connect with others and promote myself, I’ve ran into a few situations where I had managed to strike up a good rapport with someone to the point of opening myself up for a business card trade. However, when I handed them off a pair of my cards and asked for theirs, I got a response that was something along the lines of:
“Oh, I don’t have any business cards with me“
I heard this just enough times to get to thinking if there was something I could do to 1) Solve the problem and 2) Do so in such a way that it builds on my brand and memorability.
In a book I’ve read and often refer to – The Referral Engine by John Jantch – There’s a reference made to one author and speaker, Scott Ginsberg. He came up with a concept called: “My Card”. Basically, he goes to networking events with blank cards that have lines on them. Whenever he comes across someone who is without theirs, he jots their information down on one blank and then hands said individual some blanks to have for themselves.
As of this writing, I don’t know if Scott has the file that he used to make his cards available, but as I needed the extra graphic design practice anyway, I decided to fire up my current digital creative goto – The GIMP – and try to throw something together myself.
This was the end result:
For my own purposes, this was decent enough for me to load as a custom design at my current goto carder, VistaPrint. The images below show what came back to me:
As of this writing, I haven’t yet had a chance to try them out in the field, but I don’t think I will need to make too many changes – if any – to a second batch. If you’d like to play around with the file for yourself and get some of your own, here are the DL links:
If you have any thoughts or opinions on this – preferable constructive – leave them in the comments. Thanks for reading.
