Business Cards for Sixty Three Bits

I love useful, innovative, and memorable business cards. You can find gazillions of interesting designs in Internet: some of them are funny and some of them are even impressive like Steve Wozniak’s one from perforated metal. Some of them are so complicated that they loose the whole point of business card — which is sharing your contact information.

Goal: Create minimalist, yet fully functional business card which had only one purpose — share contact information.

First of all, it had to be dead simple; simple, informative and memorable. Making simple business card memorable is tough task but adding QR code and portrait layout would help a little. Portrait layout also helps with big amount of information: everything fits brilliantly and business card still feels light and not like a piece of paper with poem written on it.

QR Codes

QR (Quick Response) Codes are old invention very popular in Japan. Basically those are two dimensional bar codes that are very fast in decoding using dedicated scanners and most importantly — phone cameras. That’s where first part of the name (quick) comes from. QR codes can represent any textual data imaginable, including web addresses, phone numbers, notes and, of course — contact information altogether in vCard or meCard formats. This brings us to business card again, why not to have a digital version of business card on “analog” one? Idea is that you point your camera-phone on business card and all contact information on frond side of the card appears in your phone immediately. That simple.

Getting rid of Job Position

All start-ups and small companies have small staff. Small staff means some of the employees share some duties; for example I’m iOS and Mac Developer, UX/UI Consultant, part-time Project Manager and Co-Founder in 63BITS. It would be silly and funny (in a bad way) to write all of those thing on a single business card. Of course, you may say, make many versions of cards exclusively for every job position. That would be fair, but instead we decided not to write job position at all and here is why.

Generally real users of your business cards are your clients, and giving them a card you mean: “Hello, My name is John Appleseed, I’m Vice President of Product Marketing at Tomato Industries”, but for a small company it may mean “Hello, My name is John Appleseed, I’m Software Developer, Graphic Designer, part-time Pizza delivery boy and sometimes I manage myself and talk to clients”. By removing job position your card would mean simply “Hi, I’m John Appleseed — your contact person” which is exactly what business card has to do.