There are many ways to create your own business card if you choose to. If you have the creativity to make a truly personal card or brand then it can be quite satisfying to make your own.
If you are good with Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator then you already have the skills and the tools to make good card designs. If you have neither of these there are plenty of other options available. There are lots of third party business card maker programs at the moment either freeware or shareware. There are also plenty of online resources that allow you to design and specify a card design through your browser.
Many of these programs offer built in templates which give you a head start in making your own card. It’s easy to take an existing style and change it into something completely yours. Changing icons, logos, fonts or the color can make a bland or dreary design into something special.
It is well worth spending time getting to know these tool as taking a stock template and merely adding your own details to it is uninspired to say the least. It also opens you up to duplication.
Duplication is an uncomfortable thing to come across in business. Imagine living in a small town and seeing another shop, van or brand that was identical to yours. This would lead to a whole heap of trouble. Would you keep yours and try and get the other company to change theirs? Would they do the same? Or would you have to completely rebrand to disassociate yourself? Whatever you would do takes time, money and effort, all wasted.
It is much better by far to spend that little extra time and effort to ensure that your brand is original and as unlike as possible to any other competitors or nearby business brands. There are simply too many companies in the world to be utterly original unless you are a design genius or extremely lucky! Something that you create yourself will have elements of your influences but will be all your own work. It should come across as authentic, and unless you copied someone else’s work will be completely original, and unlikely to be duplicated elsewhere. That isn’t to say of course that someone won’t come along and use your ideas in their brand, but by then you should have a decent head start on them!
If you don’t have the creativity to design your own card then there are plenty of people out there who have. I used a designer to create mine and he did a far better job, in far less time than I could have done. Paying someone else to do work you could figure out yourself may go against the grain for some. My theory is I could earn way more doing what I do best in the time it would have taken me to create a good card, than it cost for me to pay someone to do it for me. Plus I now have a design contact who I can rely on if I need one in the future.
Filed under: business card maker
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