I decided to tackle a design assignment today: Create Your Own Business Card which was dreamed up by one Lauren Brumfield in a previous ds106 job.
I wanted to develop a calling card for Bond, Black, Groom and me — we’re getting more and more informal requests for our services and it seemed like maybe it was time to take it up a notch.
I’m a big fan of the Noun Project. If you haven’t used it, you should check it out. It’s a great source of simple, elegant icons that you can then modify, mix, and use for your own designs. Many of the icons on the NP are available to use for free, as long as you give proper credit. When you download the images, the credit line is actually appended to the image. That’s a new development at the NP, and, while I understand it, it sort of runs counter to the notion of a clean graphic. I cropped those attributions out, and instead of provided my own credit below. Honestly, I think this approach is better. The text on a graphic can’t be read or indexed by a search engine, so the creator can’t take advantage of the reputation-building feature of linking and searching. My text, on the other hand, is completely machine-readable and indexable, thereby allowing the creator to more easily track where her or his work is being used.
In any case, I decided to find an iconic representation for each of us and use that in my first design iteration. Take a look at my attempt:
I chose a very simple color palette to to complement the basic icons, but added a touch or color to them to make them stand out a bit more. Obviously BBB&G wouldn’t use a landline for contact; Twitter is really the best channel for getting in touch with us, so a hashtag just made sense. (Thanks to Black for pointing out that hashtags can’t contains special characters. I had to take the ampersand out.)
I liked this attempt, but I thought I’d create a second version that paid homage to another character in our group, a mysterious presence who were still trying to wrap our heads around. Take a look at my second attempt:
The design of this one isn’t as clean, I think. But it’s got a kind of playfulness to it that I like. I’m curious to hear what other people thing.
Honestly, there’s not a lot of playfulness in the air these days. Groom appears to still be either missing or hiding. . .his last tweet indicated he’d pre-scheduled some posts for this week (perhaps he sensed the job was going bad?), but I’ve seen nothing published on his blog!
I’m looking into the matter myself and I’ve unearthed some very troubling evidence. I’ll be sharing that today or tomorrow in my weekly video. Stay tuned.
Bond doing his part to try and find the strange man who appeared with Groom during the weekly video, but when I speak with him he’s still playing it pretty tight-lipped. He won’t really tell me much about the whole El Jota character and what exactly their previous work together involved.
Black has been mysteriously quiet of late. I’m not entirely sure what’s going on with her. She hasn’t contacted me directly since that last video when she received the  mysterious phone call and suddenly ducked out. However, I did discover today that she’s been reaching out directly to El Jota!
And, then, of course there is this El Jota bird. Everyone seems to think he’s on the up and up, but I’m not so sure. Did you see his revelation the other day that he appears to be able to make himself invisible? I don’t know about all of you, but I find that a bit unsettling. Right?
I guess what I’m saying is that making these business cards was a great exercise in design, but I’m not really sure if the four of us can make use of them anytime soon?
