I just had a discussion with a colleague about the format limitations of business cards, and we came to some interesting conclusions. Even though business cards are used less often these days due to many industries switching to digital communication formats (when’s the last time you saw a Rolodex?), many people still use them. Some of those people even use them in interesting and non-conventional ways. Let’s see how far we can push these limits and fit as much as we can on a business card. You’ll be able to fit more than you think…
- For the considerations of this article, project will be used to refer to the game, supplement, table, content, or otherwise that you are trying to fit onto your business card.
- The format of this article will be as follows:
- The first heading will refer to the particular design element that we are considering.
- The second (or sub-) heading will address how we can push it to the limit.
- Difficulty consideration: I’ll suggest how difficult it might be to utilise such an element, print it, produce it, or such, on this scale: Easy, Medium, Hard. The harder it is, the more specialised equipment you would require to produce or consume a card using such an element.
SPACE
Our first element is space. You are limited by how much physical (or digital) space you have on the card (or “canvas”). You’ve only got a few square centimeters/inches to work with, and have to fit all of your content on there. Does this mean that you have to use tiny text? On one hand, yes. That is, if your project has a lot of detail in it. On the other hand, no. If your project is simpler, less wordy, or smaller in scope, then you won’t need to worry too much about this.
Push it to the limit!
Business cards generally come in a few shapes and sizes (most often rectangles or oblongs of about 3.5” x 2”, or about 90mm x 55mm… there abouts). However, let’s consider this: What if it was folded? A pamphlet, even? You could increase the amount of space you have on a card by creating a “tent”. That is, a card folded on the long edge to give you as much space as two conjoined cards. Or you could do that twice for a tri-fold card. Heck, you could create a concertina card that gives you as much space as ten or so business cards. You could even push it as far as what Z-CARD does–a card that is the size of a business card when folded, but unfolds to the size of an A4 page.
Producing this element: Easy! You can get a template and print it from home. However, the more you squeeze into a card, the more you’ll struggle to still be able to produce it and fold it easily.
Viewing it printed: Easy! Get a template that shows you where to cut and fold, then print it from your own printer, then you can view it. You’d just have to fold it correctly.
Viewing digitally: Easy… Medium? but also different from computer to mobile. It might be a bit awkward to view a folded/concertina’d/Z-CARD card in a PDF viewer, depending on how the PDF has been produced or set up. A folded card might simply have a few pages to scroll between, but a Z-CARD would look jumbled because the ‘pages’ (i.e. each ‘front’ of each folded page) won’t just go from left to right, top to bottom. The ‘front’ of the card is the bottom left panel, and the ‘back’ is the top right panel. (You can see this on templates and examples online.)
FONT
Our second element is the font you choose for your project, and by an extension, the phrasing/wording, content, or words you use. While it is easy to fill up a page with text, it is much harder to choose the most concise, meaningful words to convey your content with the fewest words possible. This is simply a thing that writers have had to learn throughout their journeys. What can we play around with here in regards to font and wording? Let’s see…
Push it to the limit!
- Rephrase sentences to be more concise. Pick your words carefully so that you can convey the most meaning with the fewest words.
- Abbreviate words. Don’t go too crazy, though! Too many abbreviations and acronyms will make your project more difficult to parse (interpret) than otherwise.
- Use more than just words. Sure, you can use the word “Engine” every time you talk about the player’s racing vehicle, but that uses a lot of letters. “Projectile” is even more. Mention “Engine” once at the start of your rules and use an icon or emoji to represent it! That way, whenever you refer to a specific element of your game (or even a system in your game), you just have to present a single emoji and the player will know what it means!
- Heck, you could even use a QR code. Someone made the entire game of Snake in a QR code once.
Producing this element: Hard. It takes considerable time, effort, and skill to push this element to its limit. Wording things is hard! Don’t let yourself fall too far down this rabbit hole, or you’ll end up rewording sentences so that you can cut down a single letter so your content will fit on a single line. Is it worth it, after all? Maybe, maybe not. Make sure to balance the time you spend on it to the amount of impact it’ll have on your project.
Viewing it printed: Easy! Correct font choice and wording is easy to print. You just print it. However, keep in mind that the smaller and more complicated font you use, the harder it will be for someone to read it.
Viewing digitally: Easy! Viewers can zoom in a lot on digital platforms, so even if the font is very small, this tends to be less of a road block than on paper.
COLOUR
Our third element is colour. In general, making sure that the colours you choose contrast well with each other will mean that your card can be easily viewed. That is, if you use bright red and dark oranges, then viewers will struggle to discern features and have a hard time playing your game. Sticking with black content and a white background is a good place to start. But let’s talk colours for a moment. What about someone has a form of colour blindness? (Yes, there is more than one type… learn about colour blindness here and here and thank me later!) If your content uses similar colours, or colours that can’t be easily discerned for someone who has a form of colour blindness, then the project won’t be able to be consumed as well as you had intended. For example, if you have red markers and green markers, then they might be difficult to discern between for people with some kinds of colour blindness.
Push it to the limit!
Let’s kick things up a notch. Firstly, use Colblinder (the site I linked you to above) to find colours that are most-easily discerned from each other. This is really just the tip of the iceberg, though. You’ve seen those red-blue glasses that you can wear and look at something printed that has two images (a red one and a blue one)? Apply that to your project. Using layered colours (red and blue… or red/green/yellow… or even cyan/magenta/yellow aka CMY), you could present two or three sets of content in a single card.
Let’s push that even further… what about UV or glow-in-the-dark inks? Now we’ve got five layers of content on a single card! Ok, perhaps that might be very difficult to produce, or even to interpret… but I’m simply here to talk about the tech. It’s up to you how you use what you’ve learned here!
Producing this element: Medium… Hard? To develop a project that uses layers, it would be reasonably simple to prepare layers in your software (assuming that you’re using some kind of software like Adobe InDesign or Affinity Publisher), but that takes a bit of knowledge in preparing it. You’d probably need to look into colour channels and masking. Looking at the UV or glow-in-the-dark ink layers might be another thing entirely. But then, you’ll have a product that has all of that information embedded into it!
Viewing it printed: Medium… Hard. Viewing this on paper would require specialised colour filters, because otherwise it would just be a jumbled mess. Red and blue cellophane (or glasses) would suffice for a red/blue colour layering. For CMY layering, it might be hard to find the same colour cellophane, so it might be better to look into photography stores/providers and get those film gel lenses that you can fit over filming lights. So, it’s more specialised. For UV printing and glow-in-the-dark printing, you’d probably need to go to a specialised photography or print company, and the print itself might take multiple passes (once for colour, once for UV, once for glow-in-the-dark). Even then, would the inks mix well? I’m not sure. But hey, it’s just an idea!
Viewing digitally: Easy… Hard. This would depend on using software to isolate each colour layer and display it separately. Not too difficult if you’ve got access to the right software (like ones I mentioned above), but vastly complex for users who aren’t familiar with it.
TEXTURE
Let’s talk about one last element: texture. Are we limited to flat paper? Well, not really! There are special books out there that have embossed elements, and even entire books produced in braille.
Push it to the limit!
You could push your card even further beyond by adding in embossed elements or braille on top of your inked layers. You could raise up particular characters or icons in your card, or even sections for a kind of ‘terrain’ (the river between our bases is lower than the plateaus that our bases sit on, for example), or raise up notches to keep track of resource tracks and such.
Producing this element: Hard. You would have to find a company that can punch elements into your cards, or produce cards that are embossed or have braille. While it might be hard to find software that can produce a file with such a raised layer, you would also have to go somewhere specific to get it printed. Some places I found cost $1 per page (which is quite expensive considering how cheap it can be to print “simple”, that is flat pages or business cards).
Viewing it printed: Easy! But also Hard. Feeling the raised elements on a card would be easy (because you can just use your sense of touch) but you would need to be able to read braille if you want to discern what the braille on a card says. It’s just another language, so go learn it if you’re interested! If the card is printed too densely, however, you would need to focus a lot more closely to ‘see’ the different content on the card.
Viewing digitally: Hard…? It might be difficult to see these layers digitally. Unless you’ve got some software to see the ‘raised’ content, you won’t be able to see it in a digital format. Perhaps if you’re using a UV map of some kind, however, it might be possible.
I hope that these aspects have given you food for thought. Let’s see how far we can push these cards in these last few days! :D
All the best to you for the last few days of the ’jam, and well done to those who have already submitted something!
- Raspilicious