"Oh my God. It even has a watermark."

As someone who has previously run my own business I understand the importance of promotional tools and using consistent branding, and high quality designs and images.

What I find interesting about this clip from American Psycho is that although the emphasis here is one the one-upmanship and pomposity attributed to the characters and the status indicated by their business cards - from a professional view point it actually highlights the importance I've previously mention about consistency and branding - with so many creative options available to us now, font/colour/etc these decisions need to be considered carefully - for example the use of a universal font - if you choose a font that is only available in certain programmes or companies then you are potentially limiting yourself to having to produce all your promotional material through those means or having to change. This can seem like a trivial concern - but it is amazing how the change of something as simple as a font can affect the aesthetic of something and be glaringly obvious when seen through consumer eyes.

My other consideration here is how relevant are business cards anymore? With so many online print stores offering easy design they don't hold the status they did at the time of American Psycho - anyone can have them printed at minimal cost and the promotional market has almost become saturated with generic looking cards - which are perfectly fine as easy ways to pass on your information - however in the creative industry I feel it needs to be a much more considered thing to have any real impact. Much like when I was choosing a website hosting platform - choosing where to have business cards printed has become about something that has an easy to use system, that allows maximum creative independence and is cost effective.

So I was on the hunt for something different something that stands out, represents my artistic practice and has an element of desirability - something you would want to keep hold of after the fact. Considering the aesthetic of my practice when I happened upon a company that produced metal business cards I was more than a little intrigued -

https://www.plasmadesign.co.uk/metal-business-cards/

these are just simply not cost effective for their purpose though.

I remembered one of the students from last years graduating class showing me their cards - which were half the width of a regular business card and you could have them printed with multiple designs on. This has clearly stuck with me and was easy enough to find online -

https://www.moo.com/uk/products/minicards

the fact they are smaller also makes them more cost effective - and take up less room in a purse or wallet. Being able to have different designs on them can potentially give a bit of ownership to the choice of card you've made. Its curious how these things work on people subconsciously.

Having previously identified an aesthetic "brand" in terms of font/name/social media I had the relevant information available to me to create the business cards very easily - the hardest part was selecting which images to use. at this point I am having 200 printed because of cost and that will hopefully cover both the degree show and Free Range Private Views and I have chosen 5 designs from the potentials shown above as that still gave me 30+ of each design.