Great Resources for Business Cards & Stationery

Written by Kate Pruitt / Design Sponge

DIY Calling Cards:
Who says your cards can’t pack a little surprise element? I love this cute and clever DIY from Katrina Tan at Pugly Pixel. Clean and modern, but with a splash of fun, graphic color–I highly doubt your recipients would soon forget these beauties.

DIY Business Card Stamp:

Created by designer Mikey Burton as part of Designer Challenge in an issue of Computer Arts, this business card DIY is brilliant. With this clever stamp, you’ll never be without your business card, and you can recycle paper of all kinds!

Stamped Business Cards:

Design*Sponge’s very own contributor Amy Merrick came up with this lovely tutorial for creating custom stamped business cards on old manila tags. Casual, chic, and so simple: this is a great way to create business cards for almost no cost.

Sites for Inspiration:
If you still haven’t found quite the right style or technique for your own business cards, then check out these sites for examples of great business cards and brand identities. You’ll see everything here: embroidered cards, pop-up cards, cards made from different materials, interactive cards, oddly shaped cards, and more. It’s fun to browse and see such clever, innovative thinking towards a little paper card, and I’m sure you’ll find a great spark of inspiration here.

Lovely Stationery:
As its name implies, Lovely Stationery culls the best stationery and paper designs from all over into a well-organized, curated collection. If you’re stumped for ideas, a visit here should do the trick.

Card DSGN:
A great place to check out all different kinds of business cards. If you want to seek out cards that use specific types of paper, ink, or other design elements, this site makes it easy with the option to search card designs by tag. If you finish your cards and want to show them off, you can also submit your own designs to the site for consideration.

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Kate Pruitt is a senior editor for Design*Sponge. After working as a retail
display artist for several years, she joined the D*S team as a weekly
DIY contributor in 2009. Her work has been featured in various print
publications, including ReadyMade, New York Magazine, Country Living
and The San Francisco Chronicle. She currently resides in California
with her boyfriend and their inadvertently diabolical cat, JFK. Design*Sponge is a daily blog dedicated to the creative life. Since its founding in 2004, Design*Sponge has grown to cover a wide range of
topics. In addition to hosting a yearly scholarship for student
designers, artists, Design*Sponge published both its first newspaper
and book this year, Design*Sponge at Home, which ended with a 30-city
book tour that raised money for local arts charities across the
country. The website currently has over 75k daily readers and 370k
Twitter followers.

Kate Pruitt

As a Contributing Editor at Design Sponge, artist Kate Pruitt shares DIY projects each Wednesday. Kate lives in Oakland, California and has a background in art/art history and recently left her job creating window displays to pursue her own work full time. Growing up in New Hampshire, Kate spent a lot of time building machines out of paper and scotch tape, and thus discovered her first DIY impulses.

http://profile.typepad.com/d101588576797890316 A Facebook User

I believe technology is surpassing business cards which is saddening to me. I liked the physical contact involved, and thus the marketing built up. I will continue to buy business cards. If anyone needs affordable business cards call 888-860-7248 ; They are Print Runner
http://profile.typepad.com/elaine88designs Elaine88designs

Very nice post! I love business card design. Another great resource to buy business cards from is Minted. com: http://www.minted.com/business-cards
- http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100003406350264 Jafna
  
  Yes, you do need to call the companies and ccenal them. They won’t actually be ccenalled until you completely pay them off though.If you have quite a few cards though, don’t ccenal them all at once. If you do, it screws up your credit rating. You should only ccenal one card every 1-2 months.
http://profile.typepad.com/adesigndockblogspotcom Adesigndock.blogspot.com

Love the companies you featured…excited to check them out. And love these DIY cards. So fun!
- http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100003406331938 Lyan
  
  I have a business that is less than a year old so I frseoee this to be a year of great gains and challenges.My business goals are:To steadily build a monthly revenue that can fully support both myself and my partner.To establish our business as the go to for art marketing advice in our local area.To build our seminars and events to the point of being able to support a two-day marketing workshop.To achieve all this we are creating strategies to build our online presence, networking with local art organizations, holding seminars and events to share our knowledge, and generally making ourselves a visible part of the community.We face the challenge of being able to get our brand and message out to enough of our target market, providing the types of services that are most needed and wanted, and growing the business at a pace that we can sustain but also support our goals.All in all I look forward to the challenges and triumphs in the year ahead.
http://profile.typepad.com/denig Eleonore Denig

I used Mary at Milkglass Creative- She has a new Etsy shop open now! HIghly recommend her.
http://profile.typepad.com/ohhellofriend Ohhellofriend

Thank you so much for including my DIY card in your round up post Kate! So many lovely cards featured here.
- http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100003406322303 Roya
  
  For Mozilla Firefox:When you visit a website, you can find if it is scuere or not by looking at the browser bar (which contains the web address). If their is a light blue thing shaded before the web address, then it is digitally scuere. Also, after the web address, their sometimes is a small construction-colored lock. This means it is verisign-secure.BUT, this does NOT tell you anything. It just means it does not steal your credit-card information. However, if you sign for a subscription service, they still charge you for something like a free trial. You MUST read their TOS, take pictures etc, just in case they charge you. The majority of websites are not-fradulent and have nice customer service.A easy way to check is to just type into google the website you want, followed by scam So, google would look like google scam . Read through some links, and determine with good judgement if you think it is a scam. Also, you can install WOT, search it, as a Mozilla Firefox plugin, and they will tell you warnings on whether a site is safe. Hope you browse safely!~DebateTech

Great Resources for Business Cards & Stationery

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