A few months ago I wrote a blog post about business card design and one on business card printing options. Today, I’d like to explore the business card theme again, but this time is all about my DIY craft project for my Home Design + DIY Blog (yes, it’s very à propos of course). I took the standard straight cut cards I had printed, and with the help of some fancy craft scissors, I was able to cut unique patterns and shapes into my cards.
Now, I should mention that I didn’t get super plain cards of course! I went for a nice matte finish with high-gloss accents, also known as Spot-UV. Basically, you send in two files to print, one as the “regular” colour design, and the other is where you specify which areas you want to be highlighted by the glossy lamination. For my cards, I chose to do the main signature on the front with the spot-UV, and on the back, I did the reverse (wherein the background is spot-UV’d and the text is normal). That way, it’s like having a matte finish on the front, and a glossy finish on the back – super cool I say!
But of course, I then got the cards in the mail, and wished I had gone with a round corner. Bah! In reality, in case I didn’t mention it before, round edges actually help extend the life of your cards because the edges don’t catch on stuff as much when you’re filing the cards away into a wallet or binder. So what was I to do?! Well, as I mentioned above, I decided to get crafty and cut the edges out of my cards by hand! After a few failed attempts at getting perfect round corners with a regular pair of scissors (not to mention the huge amount of time it took), I then explored just a straight diagonal cut instead. Much easier to do, but my angles were a bit off on each corner (and I didn’t want to have to actually get out a ruler and measure each edge, times four, times like a hundred cards). I then knew that it would be best to use the craft scissors with the crazy shapes built in.
First step, buy those crazy scissors of course. The only ones they had at Michaels that I could find (in the 3 minutes I ran into the store) was an 8 pack of mixed designs… four of which were just straight cut (and children’s scissors nonetheless). There might have been more options in the scrapbooking section (perhaps for adults) but I didn’t have the time to browse around the store as I had somewhere to be.
Either way, I brought the scissors home and began testing out the different options I could do. First I did straight cuts on the short edges of the cards, and thought that was pretty unique; then I tried to just cut the corners of the cards using the different scissor shapes. I also tried tighter and deeper corners, and centering the end of the corner at a different part of the scissors each time. In the end, the best option was probably the corner cuts using the “jigsaw” scissors – which is basically just the diagonal edges I was mentioning before (but this time the angles were perfect because of the shape of the scissors).
I haven’t cut all my cards up yet, in fact, I think I’ll keep them regular for the time being. I might end up cutting only a few at a time when I need them, and I even thought that I could use different patterns for different events I go to or times when I plan on handing out a bunch of cards. I could always be like “Oh which cards do you have, the ones with the wavy edges, well then I must have met you here” or something like that.
So how about you? Which of the patterns or cuts do you prefer from the ones I’ve done? Or maybe you have a different cutting suggestion that I haven’t thought of? I know I’ve seen a couple different home customization of business cards online (sorry, that sentence doesn’t really make sense). For example, squishing your cards together and then doing a custom painted edge (rather than paying for that premium feature). But of course, that’s something that you can probably only get away with by having thicker cards. Either way, I’d love to hear your thoughts!