Brand Thyself (The Agony of the Personal Business Card)

I have spent the weekend branding myself. Not with a hot iron but the process has, at times, felt as painful. For weeks, I have been putting off the design of personal business cards. It has been hard enough to distill my professional existence into an A4-sized CV. But the business card demands a little more. It asks not what you have done but what you can do. Well I can do a lot of things.

The first two cards show what happens when personal branding goes awry. Good branding/marketing is supposed to send a consistent message. With this in mind, I figured that D/A could be my brand and that my business cards should carry through some of the design cues from D/A and elsewhere. The first card contains the D/A banner mascot. It works in the sense that it builds on the D/A brand but Mr Mascot looks a little confused after making the leap from screen to paper stock. As for the second card, drunken art figurines waving their hands in the air would be better suited for handing to the person with whom I have just done a Tuaca shot as opposed to someone with whom I have just shook hands.

Annoyed with this direction, I took a different approach. Instead, I was going to go the other marketing route, which is simply to make a good impression. I started with my two favourite colours, blue and green, and relied on an old photo from flickr and a palette of greens for design cues.

I do like these cards. The clouds card is either going to suggest limitless possibility or that I have my head in the clouds. The green tetris cards have some cool design elements but I am not sure what it says other than I know my way around Photoshop or that I may have a penchance for mid-century design (confession: I do).

But neither card tells you anything about my professional expertise. This is good if you subscribe to the philosophy sometimes what you don’t say is as important as what you do say. That being said, I decided to create one last card, a conservative blue one, that does list some of my professional specialities. (Although, I did add creative solutions in order to suggest that I may have just a tad to offer beyond project management and database marketing).

After weeks of agony, there you have it, my business card palette. They were quickly ordered from moo this afternoon so I can move on and agonise about something else.

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