make your own {business cards}

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Well, as you know, I am on my way to Haven right. this. second. Enter nervous jitters here.

This gal on an airplane sure is hoping she’s not the odd man out in a room full of people everyone promises is welcoming and inclusive. Fingers and toes and strands of hair and anything else crossable crossed.

And pretty, pretty please … if you see me, and I have food in my teeth, or something random in my hair or toilet paper stuck to my shoe (Oh lord, please don’t let that happen!) please let me know. Thanks! 🙂

So, this Haven trip is a very last-minute thing. For those not in the know about this thing, the conference actually sold out a few months ago. I hadn’t seriously considered going before that. But, you know when you’re just not sure about something and then you get backed into a corner and then all of a sudden it becomes crystal clear where you stand on the situation? Like the minute I found out the conference was sold out and I all of a sudden Had. To. Go! You know?!?

Well, fast forward a few months after having put my name on a waiting list for tickets, I get a last-minute email that a few tickets had opened up. After confirming I would not need to sleep on the street and getting instant approval from the most supportive husband evah, I was in!

And what is the one thing that all conference goers NEED in addition to a durable spray painted tote bag … business cards. And, since I only had a few days to make it happen I decided to DIY ’em.

From what I understand, some bloggers will be bringing cool things that go WITH their business cards. I will not be. I’m just happy that I was able to DIY some cute little business cards and I won’t be empty-handed. And, as for the swag others are bringing, thank goodness I’m not worried about keeping up with the Joneses I’d rather receive than give I’m used to not being the cool kid with the fancy things anyway.

But, I’ve got business cards, and I made them all by myself. Here’s how.

I knew I didn’t want anything fancy, but I really wanted something to reflect the look of my blog. Lucky for me, I am not as dumb as I look when I was moving my blog to it’s current self hosted wordpress format, and I created my new header, I had the forethought to save the back image of only the 3 green stripes.

So, for the base of my business card I uploaded my saved image of the 3 green stripes into Picmonkey and cropped it to the right proportions. The standard business card size is 2″ x 3 1/2″, my striped image height was 198 so I made the width 346.
Then I added my wording. Now, I looked all around people. I checked out what other people had on their blog business cards. And I saw a variety of things. And believe you me, there really is a limitless amount of info that one could put on a business card. But … what’s the point of a blog business card? In my opinion:

I want my business card to tell people the name of my blog, what my blog is about and the blog url.

Once people get to the blog, I have all of my social media icons where we can get connected and I’m not exactly trying to drive traffic to someone else’s site. Sorry Mark Z – but you seem to be doing a good job of that all on your own.

In hindsight, I think I will add my name and email address to my next set of business cards, I have no need to have my mug on there, but I do think a human name would add a nice personal touch and it would be convenient to have contact info for those sponsors looking to email me and let me know how much they’d like to pay to advertise on the blog. 😉  And I’ll probably use a different font for my blog description as it came out kind of light and probably hard to read for anyone without perfect eyesight. Boo.

Anyway, anyone who asks, knows that I am in love with my blog theme. It is so easy to customize and navigate it makes me feel smart. So, when I was adding my wording to my business card, I just hopped over to my theme admin panel and copied the color codes that I actually use on my blog to match the colors exactly on my business card.
Yes, green is my favorite color of all time. 🙂

So, referring to exactly what information I wanted my business card to include, I got to creating the look of the card. And instead of adding any graphics … I actually just added some strategically placed lines of periods to hopefully give it some whimsy without getting too cutesy.
Now, once you have your image just so, save it as a .jpg and then copy and paste it in a word document, 10 will fit on one sheet.
I’ll be honest here, I don’t know exactly how it ended up that my image size (198×346) turned out to be exactly the right size (2″x 3 1/2″), but I’ll take it. 🙂

Now, if you want a two-sided card, just repeat all of the steps above to create your backside image. I chose to go with just one little detail on the back side so I didn’t need to do any additional editing. I just created what I wanted on the back and pasted it onto sheet 2 in my word document. Dun dun dun …
A QR Code. I just feel so avant-garde, so ahead of the game, so on top of the latest tech trend. 😉

Except, that I have to admit, with a shy grin, raised eyebrows and a shrug of the shoulder … I haven’t tested it yet. I know, right?!?! Oh well. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, it doesn’t take away from the card, it’s on the back, I don’t have a fancy pants phone and didn’t think to phone a friend about it so it is what it is. And, if it works, I will feel too cool for school so we will just have to see how it all goes down.

I followed the steps here for how to create the code (except for step 3, obviously) and generated the code here.

I just lined it up in my word document so it would print around the bottom right hand corner of the back side of my business cards. I test printed it at home and held the sheet up to a light to see how the front and back lined up and then I took my masterpiece to a local printer and bought 15 sheets of 10 cards. After taking about an hour to paper cut them all down to size I had about 140 cards … I got a little aggressive with the paper-cutter in spots. 🙂

TIP!!!  If you have Publisher software the printing company will be able to cut the cards as well because it will all be lined up perfectly in their business card template.

Not sure what the going rate in the states would be but I paid Nafl 47.50, which calculates to about $.19 per usable card and I love that they perfectly reflect my blog’s image.

What do you think? Think I’m crazy for not including any other contact detail? Have you ever DIYed your own business card and have any other tips we should know? Think I’m going to be the loser, odd ball out at Haven? 🙁