Growing Up and Moving Out

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As mentioned in my first blog post, Standing Out From the Crowd, Red Giant is a venture in which we aimed to be remembered. One of the primary image-related things we focused on in order to achieve that goal was great business card design.

A full 2 weeks were spent researching, brainstorming, designing and redesigning our business cards, in order to make sure they were perfect. We wanted to receive great reactions every time we handed out a business card. So far, so good!

If you're looking to have business cards designed that are above average and make people look twice, here are some things you could do:

Look for some Inspiration

Whenever we design anything, we usually do a quick search for awesome designs which might give us some ideas or inspiration.

Some of the things you find might be quite costly and impractical, but they are more often than not really interesting to look at.

One thing to bear in mind is that a business card still needs to perform a function.

It's primary purpose is to give people the information they need to contact you. This info should be easily identified and readable. A business card that doesn't perform this function effectively is a waste of money, regardless of how "clever" or unique the design is.

Remember White Space

Just because you have a whole card to work with doesn't mean you need to fill every single bit of the card. White space is an extremely important feature in any good design work, be it a business card, website or anything else.

The general rule of thumb is two thirds content, one third white space.

With our business cards, we really took this to heart and tried to create clean-, elegant-looking cards by using a lot of white space. We used space to effectively draw attention to what we wanted people to see (e.g. our slogan).

Try Adding a bit of Personality

As stated in Standing Out from the Crowd, it's important to make yourself remembered by your target market. The way we attempted to do this was by adding some personality to our branding efforts.

We created mini Red Giants which were representative of the personalities of each person in our team. Our team of Red Giants is carried through in all our branding efforts, both on the website and on our business cards.

Each person's card has a quirky story on it relating to that person, adding some personality to the brand. We consider it extremely important to remind our target market that there are real people behind the brand which they can identify and communicate with.

There are many things you can do to personalise your cards. We find it works best if your branding efforts reflect YOUR personality because people tend to want to deal with people, not corporate facades.

Little Details

There are various things you can do to to give your cards a more elegant, classy look.

We made use of rounded corners (only 2) as well as UV Spot gloss (gloss that catches the light, which can be applied accurately to text/other intricate aspects of your card) on the important information.

Most of these things can only be done by a good printer and can be quite costly. (One of the printers we enquired with wanted a minimum quantity of 5000 cards per design!)
If you are looking for a great printer, we use Media Works. These guys print up in JHB and take 10-14 days to complete the job, but they are extremely reasonable price-wise and they deliver to your door, countrywide. Oh, and they produce fantastic quality printing!

A couple other things you could consider are embossing and lamination. I would also suggest using a good quality board for your cards. 300gsm is the optimal thickness.


Ultimately, business cards are an extremely important business tool and are well worth investing a bit of money in. I would rather spend a bit extra to create cards that people are likely to keep and remember than cards that go straight into the trash.

What do you think?