Business Cards of the Day: Mix and Match

Top Row: “Feeling Overwhelmed?” — at first I thought this card was for a psychiatric counseling service when I saw it on a bulletin board in Newport, PA. Somehow I hear Bob Wiley saying, “Well, at least I do not have to stress about photographers...” Context is everything for this card, and frankly, it doesn't work in a café. The card next to it is for locally-made wing and marinade sauces. We haven’t tried these, but the graphics tie in nicely to the label designs.

Middle Row: I have a feeling that the cake card is a stock image since the type is seemingly an afterthought. DCNR — pretty typical official government state agency formatting of text. Ranger Onavage is a quite the talker!

Bottom Row: One24 — even looking online, it is hard to tell what this card is about, but it appears to be a get-rich-quick [within 24 months!] scheme. Apparently she is not making enough to get new cards printed and just scratches over the phone number at this point. Maybe in another 24 months she’ll get new cards? The card next to it is for a photographer “of the unusual and extraordinary.” The card reflects the subject matter and tone of the photographs for sale.

Business Cards of the Day: Apple

The two on the left are from the early 1980s,
one on the right is from this year.
Clean designs that range from four color-apples and
cool-grey type, to silver foil and black text.

Business Cards of the Day: Vegan & Vegetarian

After a couple of trips to NYC and a vegetarian festival in Washington, D.C, I had some cards piling up to post. Quite the variety of shapes, sizes, and one is even a sticker [Action for Animals]. The two round ones above [purple and golden yellow] are actually the front and back of the same card for gobo. Very often, The Bacon is Not an Herb card [bottom row] has a QR code sticker on the back as well [seen to the right of that card] — kudos for great eye-catching use of technology!

Business Cards of the Day

South Side Tattoo and Body Piercing: Sometime, no matter how much you like a script font, you just shouldn’t use it.

Apple: Clean, classy, and a silver foil Apple logo. It just works. I have an older card from the early 80s at work that I’ll have to post again [lost when I deleted my old blog] as a comparison.

Houck & Gingrich: Simple, clean, Lewistown typesetting. At least it is all in the same font, though the letter spacing is a bit tight for all caps.

Business Cards of the Day

Espresso Yourself Cafe: Simple two color design, the typography choices are hard to read, but they do have excellent vegetarian food options!

Going Local: A lot of information packed onto this card, in fact too much information and too tiny. A better solution would have been to go to a two sided card.

Hotel State College & Company: Great ampersand, though it is a bit forced and crowded intertwining with the “S” and “C” and the gradient, well. . . it just doesn’t stand up to the test of time forcing the balance. Using thin display type for small text isn’t a good idea either, no matter how nice the font.

Rocket Science: Overall, a nice card. I like the tagline they use as well, especially since I am not mechanically inclined. Easy to read font choice too

Otto’s: Swoosh! Double swoosh! Not a fan of flush right text, and the flipping back to flush left. I miss the cat design. Perhaps just  one swoosh and a different type treatment...

19th Century Trade Cards and Advertisements

via letterology
“With so few marketing options available for shopkeepers in the 19th C, the trade card was considered an essential form of advertising. Designers were just as compelled to create sharp examples of typography and printing then as they are today—much of it hand lettered and illustrated to promote their skills. American cards were intended to be more colorful than some of the European cards and they soon became quite collectable. These ornate trade cards eventually evolved into the business card as we know it today…”
See more examples here, and here at Sheaff: Ephemera listed under The Printing Trades tab.

Business Cards of the Day

I really like that the Digimarc card utilizes their our technology of using an embedded imperceptible digital watermark. Learn more about Digimarc here.

AA Taxi — “[From one side of a fictional phone conversation] We need to keep the name and web address ABOVE the bricks in the stadium photo... no, no, no, you cannot crop the taxi’s wheels. I do not care about the photo’s proportions! Absolutely not,, we cannot reshoot the image so that it works, no one cares about proportions. Look, I do this all the time in Word — just stretch the image so that it fits the card, it’s easy! No one will notice that now the Joe Paterno statue looks like he is barely 5 fee tall and weights over 250 pounds or that our cab looks like a flattened low-rider. Perfect! Print ’em. Wait, you are charging me for these changes? But it is MY card...” Ah, taxi stories. They generally last just about two weeks and then fade away.

Every time I look at The Enchanted Kitchen card, I think of Bewitched. Which led me to this site of Mischa Ho’s font Witched. Even though it isn’t Mischa’s font, it still reminds me of it.

Hotel Manor was a welcome break at the end of a 26 mile bike ride. If you are up near Slate Run, be sure to stop by— they have a nice menu and a perfect location overlooking Slate Run and the rail trail. Their paw-print HM logo is just a bit too forced for my liking though.

Business Cards of the Day

Four cards I discovered on a recent trip. Freeze Frame Reality has used a nice spot gloss varnish. The Art Out of the Box card reminded me so much of the local equivalent to it [Artbox Studios] and I just had to laugh at the similarity. The next card, well, is self-explanitory: I buy. ’nuff said. Dog Gone Walking is my favorite in this series of finds [both sides of this card are shown, along with a close-up]. Clean design, nice muted color choices, sophisticated typography along with a touch of humor on a topic that can make me go on a rant.
Click on the images for a larger view.

Smithsonian: Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum

I recently spent a few morning hours exploring the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum with my daughter-in-law and wife. We took our time wandering through the two current exhibitions “Set in Style: The Jewelry of Van Cleef & Arpels” and “Color Moves: Art and Fashion by Sonia Delaunay” as well as the gift shop. It was interesting to see the many influences of the world on the designers in the exhibitions, and then back again as their designs influenced the world. I was particularly impressed by the Chinese Magician pocket watch, the transforming zipper jewelry, and the Bronx Cocktail bracelet. The old ledgers documenting the design process were a very nice addition as well.


I hope someday to visit the the Museum’s Drue Heinz Study Center for Drawings and Prints which is currently closed. It houses more than 160,000 works of art dating from the Renaissance to the present related to the history of European and American art and design. The collection includes designs for architecture, decorative arts, gardens, interiors, ornament, jewelry, theater, textiles, graphic and industrial design, as well as the fine arts. You can browse through their holdings here.

The gift shop is a visual feast as well, with such wonders as the Hazelnut Box with Miniature Knife and Yoshida The Crow Model Airplane. “The Crow design was the first such model plane to ever be built and flown in Japan. It dates from 1889, when its inventor based his model on the crow’s wing span after studying them in flight.”

Business Card of the Day

Picked up in Corning, NY. The front and back are indeed two different colors, though I am not sure why.

Business Card of the Day

Found posted on a bulletin board at Tractor Supply Company. I’m not entirely sure what a wildlife service person does . . . 

Business Cards: Page XXXIX

First off, a giganormous Thank You to the love of my life for taking the time to scan these pages for me! And so this post wraps up the page scans of business cards. In the future, if I come across any I find interesting—the good, the bad, and the ugly—I'll post them individually. I hope you enjoyed looking through these as much I have.

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