I am, at heart, a conservative, a formalist and a curmudgeon.
I remember, in childhood, that I thought having a business card meant something serious about you. The only people I encountered who had business cards were professionals, and the cards all looked basically the same. You could have any color you wanted, as long as it was somewhere between white and ivory. Black thermographic ink. And your choice of Bank Gothic, Copperplate or a couple of classic serif typefaces.
When I was thirteen, my first band, The Inbreds, booked its first show, in the garage of some punk house in New Brunswick, NJ. Our lead singer’s mom and stepdad drove us down from Boston, and there were all these older punks (21? 23? Ancient!) milling around and drinking beer from a keg. I was talking to one pierced, tattooed fellow, and when we parted, he pulled out his card and handed it to me. It looked like every other business card I had ever seen, but it said:
Angel Serrano
Skinhead
Blew my mind.
And then the internet happened and all of a sudden everyone had a snazzy, thoroughly-designed business card, something really personal that really spoke to the bearer’s personality. 4/4? No prob! Foil stamping? Groovy! Three-panel foldout? Now you’re talking. And in all fairness, I too have a snazzy, well-branded business card, handsomely printed on thick stock by Moo.com.
But I miss the old form, in my curmudgeonly heart.
So for the purposes of this class, my business card is:
Printed on Hahnemuhle Copperplate that someone was kind enough to leave a few sheets of in my possession. Thick enough to serve as a card, soft enough to travel through an inkjet printer.
And on the back is an original artwork that I have decided to call “Guinea Pig Fantasia No. 1.”
