New Business Cards

[bjarvis]

Thanks to tdjohnsn, my square dance business card has been updated. I used a different photo --I'm much greyer than I was for the first one-- and I've now added C2 to my square dance offerings. I also decided to lose the cowboy hat: to non-square dancers, there's already too many country overtones of dancing in barns with bales of hay and I don't want to make that misconception any worse.

Before:


After:

Comments

[weekilter.livejournal.com]

Well, everyone has an opinion. They both looks good to me though personally I really like the first one that has the straw hat.

[apparentparadox]

I wonder how much longer an actual snail mail address will be on cards. It's important to know the area you're in so the can know if you are local or would have to travel, but the street address will probably go the way of telex - there are faster ways to get you contracts.

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

I suspect the physical snail-mail address is something which won't go out of fashion in our lifetimes, not until the bulk of society becomes so mobile that a permanent address becomes a meaningless concept.

Becoming that mobile either requires an enormous level of wealth to move all of one's stuff, or we as a society have to let go of the person-with-the-most-toys-wins mentality and embrace the less-is-more mindset. I don't see that happening in my lifetime.

[apparentparadox]

I don't think that street addresses will go away, just that people won't expect to see them in general on business cards. More and more communication comes over phones or the Internet, so why even include a street address in the future when dropping it could give more design possibilities? If the expectation is that only a small percentage of folks care about street addresses, then I can see it going away and those few people contacting the business using one of the other means to get that info when they need it. Besides, a QR code or something would be better to encode all that stuff that isn't very useful, and is less error prone than to copy from a card.

In the old days, people believed that having a real address somehow made the company more likely to be a good, stable company. But with the proliferation of places like Mailboxes, Etc, which can give you a "real" address in just about any town and forward the mail to your seedy hotel room, people know that having a prestigious address or area code don't mean the company really is based there. So, while a street address had marketing benefits before, publicizing it now really doesn't.

For you, saying "DC Metro area" is a better use of space than the whole address thing. That saved space could be used in multiple ways - perhaps by adding some tag line that describes your philosophy in calling (fast & furious? Good with beginners? Established 1995?) that might be better advertising than a street address. Or maybe removing the address just lets there be more open space and thus a cleaner look.