Photo by bargainmoose
I know it’s strange for a blog like this to be talking about ordering business cards. After all, by definition it’s not exactly paperless.
However, since I have been going to some conferences lately I decided I needed some cards. For better or for worse, it’s still the most common way to exchange information.
I figured since I was going to order some cards, I’d try to do something slightly different (for where I live anyways).
A number of my friends are big Moo fans, so I decided to order my business cards from there. Moo business cards have printing on both sides and you can have a bunch of different designs for no extra charge, so here is what I did:
- Went to Wordle.net. If you’re not familiar with Wordle, it takes any text that you throw at it and then generates a “word cloud” weighted by the frequency that the various words show up.
- On Wordle, I input the DocumentSnap RSS feed so that my word cloud would be the most recent topics that we’ve been talking about on the site
- Wordle will generate clouds with different fonts, weights, and colors, so I generated 10 word clouds and took screenshots. That way, I’d have 10 different cards
- In Moo, I created my business cards and uploaded the 10 different screen shots for the back of the cards.
- I decided to keep my contact information pretty spare. I didn’t put a title or phone number. I have similar thinking to Darren Barefoot, but I couldn’t bring myself to be quite as hardcore as him.
Here are the results:
When my cards arrived, I was really happy with them. I get lots of compliments both on the quality of the paper and the word cloud on the back.
When I re-order, I’ll just run the RSS feed through Wordle again, generate some more screenshots, and then my cards will always have relatively recent topics from the site.
How about you? Do you have any examples of business cards you like, or even better have you done away with biz cards altogether? Let us know in the comments.
