Connect With Me Card | Creative
Whenever networking with people, usually you try and exchange contact information. This project aims to simplify that process by providing a modern, efficient solution, that also showcases my creativity and design expertise.
Making the Design
I took inspiration from many business cards I have seen businesses have. Usually, they are focused on practicality, displaying a persons name, their profession, and a phone number and/or email. Nowadays, people are increasingly using platforms like LinkedIn to share their contact information, and connect with people.
I wanted to create a card that would be able to host all that infomration, but also be more memorable than a standard white paper business card. I also decided that the cards with the least information on the card itself actually looked the coolest in my mind, so a QR code would be able to both have all the information I might want to share, but also be minimalistic. I got to work on Illustrator, and created my first iteration.
First iteration
My first design is very similar to what I ultimately ended up going with. I really like topographical maps and the elegance of intricate lines, so I searched for inspiration online and ended up modifying some designs I found to fit my vision.
Through my work at the Rutgers Makerspace, I had access to a fiber laser, which I taught myself how to use and modified my design to be compatable with. I had the belief that if I made an aluminum card, it would be more durable and visually appealing when I remove the black annodization. It required refining the design since the fiber laser only operated on DXF files, meaning any of the filled regions had to be correctly outlined without overlaps to be correctly hatched and marked by the laser. After a few iterations, I ended up making a jig using acrylic and a Tormach CNC mill to have consistent reproducability in positioning.
Using the jig, I was able to make multiple cards, letting me hand them out to people instead of only keeping one for myself. I also experimented with different color annodizations to see which looked best. In the collage below you can see the different variations and colors.
Final design
I loved the outcome, and was happy to leave it as is. One of my coworkers however showed me their NFC card which they use to connect with people on LinkedIn. It was plain with no design, but the concept was intriguing. I decided to incorporate the functionality to my card, which I could print on using a UV printer. This also let me use colors which was not previously possible on the fiber laser using aluminum.
I also at this point changed the QR code to redirect to my links page on this website, instead of a static link, utilizing DNS url redirection to let me change the destination at any time. A restriction however with this new design is that I don't hand the card out anymore, and instead just tap or have someone scan the card, since the NFC chip makes each unit more expensive.
A collage of the final card is below, as well as illustrator artboards and some additional variations I made using sublimation.
