You certainly recall a few months back when I awoke quite anxious that my business cards needed updating, and I’m happy to report that this has now been taken care of.
This takes a surprisingly long time, even longer this time around. Part of that is, I have multiple designs for the cards, all example photos of mine, so I don’t change one, I change several. And part of it is due to routine graphics issues.
It’s actually been a while since I’ve changed them, and the last versions were done in Photoshop. I’m now using GIMP, which opens Photoshop files just fine, and have even loaded the obscure font that I like to use (Eras Demi ITC.) Except that Photoshop never could render that font in italics, so I had to copy it over from MS Word, and that disagrees with GIMP on what the ‘proper’ slant for italics is supposed to be (why is that, anyway?) Whatever – it meant I couldn’t just change the address, I had to retype everything. This also meant that I had to pick the font size that worked best too.
While doing all this, I decided that some of the older designs needed updating, especially with more current photos, and so I designed seven more, some of which are seen at right. Those were all easy, since the original photos all had not just adequate blank space, but low contrast and relatively smooth backgrounds that wouldn’t interfere with the laid-in text. Naturally, I’m aiming for complementary colors, and so I often try a couple different ones to see what stands out best. For most of the designs, this was a simple issue, and I’d like to think my choices are aesthetically pleasing, especially for the second anole image, the one that’s mostly black; the font color is actually a dark olive, but it seems to work well against the image itself, maintaining the ‘muted light’ and letting the anole head take precedence.
Now, how well does any of this work? Does it make the slightest bit of difference, and if so, how slight? Probably not much at all, but I do at least get compliments on my cards, so there’s that. Would any design, or other aspect, lead to more sales in some way? Not very likely, but at least they’re not boring or too simple. Though someone might say I’m too fussy I suppose…
[By the way, the actual cards have more info than this, but I tend to leave a lot of personal info offline so it’s not readily available to snooping assholes, in case this hasn’t been obvious.]
Occasionally, my choices have led to more difficulties, however.
The top one, for instance, had more contrast, a bit of clutter from the branches, and necessitated laying in a drop-shadow behind the text to delineate the edges more – I’m still not entirely sold on this one, but I’ll probably print it anyway. The bottom one is fine, but I made a small change: the background to the right, where the text goes, has been dodged a bit, lightened from the original image to let the text stand out better – you can compare it to the left side, behind the woodpecker, to see how it originally looked. It’s very subtle and doesn’t look altered at all, so it works for me.
[You may or may not have noticed, but there is definitely a tendency for subjects to be oriented to the left side and looking right, leaving the text over on the right side. I can’t say for sure if this reflects simply my choices for card images or if I really do shoot the original photos more that way; possibly a little of both, because it seems more pleasing to me like this. There’s probably something psychological to be found underlying this, and if I get really bored I’ll attempt to figure out what it is. Feel free to speculate.]
And a few times, I have to abandon my selections.
Now, I really wanted to use this design, because it shows behavior and seems to me to speak more of “active nature photography” or something like that. I mean, I really do shoot a lot of nature portraiture, but I’d like to have more behavior photos. This one, however, just couldn’t be made to work: the details and contrast of the trunk simply interfered with the text and made it hard to read, regardless of the color choice – you can see that the trunk transitions between light grey and deeper shadow, with lots of fine dark details. It would have taken too much alteration to eliminate that; I’d already dropped one previous card design for exactly that reason, because I don’t think images that look too edited send the right message. There’s also the fact that the woodpeckers crowd towards the center more, but I couldn’t frame them better for the card proportions – it’s already against the left side of the original frame, and cropping tighter would trim off portions of the adult woodpecker. Some choices simply won’t work.
I admit we’re a bit heavy on birds in this post, but there’s more variety when the other designs are included; these are just some of the new ones. Still, a mammal card would be nice, but my stock is notably low on good mammal pics – they tend to be more nocturnal around here and thus harder to get. Yet, prompted by these thoughts just now, I started rooting through my beaver stock, and so far haven’t found anything that would work. They either suffer from poor lighting (see above about nocturnal) or too much clutter from the surroundings. I’ll keep looking, though. I’m not going to resort to deer, since everyone has deer pics – it almost suggests that I’m not very good if all if I have to feature those.
[Leave it alone.]
So, yeah, you might think it’d be simple, but it takes a bit of thought and effort to master a new set of business cards. Or at least it does for me…