I make business cards from leftover and cutoff material.

These ones are made from record covers from the record clock project. They’re the most popular of all my cards followed by my hacked card project.

How do I know these are the most popular? I’ve done A-B testing by handing them out with other cards and people always keep the laser one and return the other. I have run into people a year or more later and they are still carrying it. Also at parties when I give out my card people often come forward saying they’ve seen it before because their friend has one or they’ve seen it online. I should mention I give out a lot of cards.

I made the design simple with little information. I also made the text large for usability (an often forgotten element of card design).

For speed of fabrication, I stayed away from etching/engraving since it’s slower. Also I think the etching has a higher chance of coming of as gimmicky. I’m using tabs to keep everything in place and have the cards come out in sheets. Easy for handling/storage/transport.

Here are some older versions of the laser cut cards.

How They’re Made

I designed in Inkscape starting with a 3.5 by 2 inch box. I added the text then converted it to curves so I could remove extra stuff like the floating center of an “O” and reduce protruding odd shapes into letters. I have the cards share borders to reduce cutting time.

Here’s some video of cutting:

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Published on: Jan 28, 2013