My new business card (2022)

I have been using the same business card design from 2007 to 2021. I had voluntarily left out my phone number and postal address, to make the cards timeless. Still, fourteen years is a long time, and everything that appears on the card apart from my name has now become outdated:

• after 15 years of work in "Software Design and Development", I have been transitioning to Instructional Design.

• the card featured my name and occupation in English and in Japanese, and was illustrated with the drawing of a Japanese rock garden, in tribute to ten trips to Japan across several years of fruitful collaboration with Japanese companies. But I have not returned to Japan in the last 12 years.

• it was a stock design and I now need a custom design to showcase my graphic design skills.

• I have grown tired of the custom email address used on my business cards, and I would rather use a new one which reflects my new occupation.

• the card includes my Skype id, but I have stopped using Skype after Skype dumped me.

• my website address starts with http while today's Web requires https; I have not updated my personal website in a long time, and I am now relying mostly on my LinkedIn profile instead.

The front of the card features a fractal shape called Sierpiński Sieve or Sierpiński triangle. It can be drawn in many different ways; here I chose to subdivide each triangle by joining the middle of each side.

The back of the card reveals the continuation of the fractal shape, with lines of text for my details nested in negative space in the middle of the fractal. But only half of the fractal shape is visible on that side of the card, because in its growth, it has already expanded to twice the length of the card. This particular cropping, which leaves symmetrical shapes missing on the top and bottom of the card, adds a layer to the visual puzzle started on the front of the card.

After reviewing the various sizes of business cards commonly found in different countries, I chose the credit card size for the convenience of storage in a credit card holder. The dimensions shown here correspond to a vertical orientation, or portrait format, with a longer height and a shorter width:

which corresponds to the following ratio:

which I multiplied by 400 to get dimensions of the view box in abstract SVG units which preserve the credit card ratio:

The factor x400 was chosen to still have dimensions expressed in round numbers after successive subdivisions:

This results in a scale factor 8 x 400 i.e. 1 inch for 3200 units.

To account for inaccuracies during trimming of the business card to the target dimensions after printing, the design must be printed at a slightly larger, including a bleed area of a few millimeters in width. While visuals must be printed all the way into the bleed area, important information such as text must keep safe of the trim boundaries, a few millimeters away from the trim line on each side. The table below lists a few recommendations for the width of the bleed area outside the document and the safe margin within:

Given that:

• ⅛in is slightly larger than 3mm.
• Exaprint is giving minimum indications, but recommends to go with more than 2mm of bleed and 5mm of margin for visual comfort.
• Copytop, on the other hand, gives values safe for most usage.

I am familiar with the safe printing margin of ¼in for letter US or A4 documents. A bleed of half that dimension, ⅛in, feels appropriate for a much smaller business card. I prefer to use a bleed value in inches which can be expressed here as a full number of units, without rounding errors:

1 inch -> 3200 units
⅛ inch -> 3200 / 8 = 400 units

I will thus add 0.125in and 400 units on both sides of the width and height, i.e. 0.250in and 800 units to each dimension. I will also shift the origin of the view box from 0,0 to -400,-400 to keep using the original coordinates unchanged for the drawing of shapes and text on the card.

Based on Exaprint's recommendations, I should also avoid putting the vertices of the triangles on the trim lines, to avoid visible inaccuracies. I will not heed that advice, which should not impact this design, as the shape of triangles will be completed mentally by the viewer even if one vertex is cut off, as shown in the Gestalt principle of closure.

CC-BY Eric Bréchemier