WYS - IDENTITY - BUSINESS CARDS

Initial Ideas 

Content 

Business cards are a very important part of an identity, being the best way to give someone your contact information while networking at industry events they are the most common way to start a new working relationship. having seen a lot of bad business cards out there I knew it was very important that the content should be easy to read almost snappy in the way that it is being shown as this helps to not confuse/overwhelm the recipient. 

Name - Contact (mobile number) - Email - Scoial Handle 

As well as these key pieces of information I also thought that would be important to include a small bio about WYS as it helps to make the business card even more informative. 

Style 

Having already found the overall aesthetic for the WYS brand (simple design executed perfectly and black and white), it is key that this was seen at every touch point of our identity, with business cards being one of the most important things for making a good first impression to new people that we are meeting. Keeping the simple style is very easy to do but making it interesting as well as functional is more of the challenge. 

Size - 85 mm x 55 mm 

We both decided that it was important for us to have a standard business card size, although it can be interesting when businesses have different styles of business cards we thought it would be better to keep it standard and let the beautiful design do the talking (not overcomplicating it).

IDEA 1

• This design looked at having all of the information including the bio on one side of the card leaving the flip side with the primary WYS logo. 
• Too much information and the information is also too small, almost gets lost of the card, need to keep in mind that this will be seen on its own when in use so needs to have something to catch the eye (BOLD). 
• We have both decided that we should have black and white cards, this way it makes it a little more interesting - e.g we both have half black cards and half white cards (subtle differences) 
• This design feels crowded - keep more simple 

IDEA 2

• Developing on from the last design, I removed the bio this helps get that bold and simple look that we are going for. 
• No social media handles, this makes it more crowded and we also think it will be better this way as out personal accounts should try and stay separate to the WYS as we think it would be better if people didn't know who are the creators behind WYS. 
• Counting the idea of us having differences between the cards, Rob's name always being at the bottom and my name always being at the top. This also helps to make them more personal for the both of us. 
• Not sure about the WYS on the same side as text, needs to be more simple. 

IDEA 3

•  Decided that portrait would be more interesting for two reasons. 1 is that you don't see portrait business cards very much and its good to be different, second is books/editorial work is normally in this dimension so it links back to that nicely, as well as this we both shoot (take pictures) portrait a lot as it is our preferred way of taking pictures. 
• Also experimenting with using the logo on a bigger scale to make the card not feel as blank as there is a lot of white space on one side. But not being able to see the full logo properly doesn't appeal to myself or Rob. 

IDEA 4

•  Now that we have both decided the general aesthetic for the business cards I thought it would be good to [play around with the idea of the falling letter that you see in our logo. This concept is playing on the idea of the falling letters, thought it would be interesting to have 10 different cards that have the logo different variations. 

IDEA 5

• Having gone through many variations of the business cards this design learns from all of them and creates a strong representation of WYS (as much as it can through a business card). 
• At this stage, we have not paid for our typefaces (will be in the future) so for a number of reasons, this is why we are using (at) instead of the normal (@) it is also a stylistic choice I think it helps to make the card more interesting. 
• Information is key - we have kept this to a good minimum giving people only what they need from a business point of view if they want to know more then they can find that out by getting in comtact with us.  

FINAL DESIGN 

• Simple black and white design to be used by both of us (half and half).
• Captial letters - creates a bold and clean look  
• Portrait > landscape 
• Key information 
• The primary logo works best for business cards as this is the first point of contact for some people so its best for them to see the main logo over the logotype.
• Ben will always be at the top and top will always be at the bottom, this gives us both and individual style of card but still obviously within the same brand. 

PRINTING / PRODUCTION 

STOCK 

Having got the design down for the business cards the next point of call was choosing the stock. It's very important for us to have the best stock possible as we want to people to see that we are all about good quality finishes. Sadly we are unable to use black stock as it is difficult and expensive to get white ink printed on a small run of cards this is something that we hope to do in the future. So the next best thing is to make sure that we have the perfect paper in both weight and texture. We used the industry standard G.F.SMITH to get our paper from, here we selected a number of different stocks to experiment with. 

After receiving all of these we selected the ones that we felt would be best for our business cards taking into consideration the weight (durability), texture and colour. 

• Strathmore Writing Wove Bright White 298gsm (Black needs to be printed again as it is patchy and also shines - white works best - printing only white ones for now)
• 298gsm is the perfect weight between being too heavy and too thin, at this weight as well means that it can be printed on most printers so it is easy for us to reproduce the cards at a low cost which is what we need. 
• Printing using the university print room doesn't give the best results when printing full colour on to the white stock, which is fine for now but we will be making sure that we get the crisp black that we want when moving further forward with this in the future.