MATERIAL
I fancied jumping in here to think about some challenging elements you could really push, one of which is: the material! Does your business card need to be made of standard woodpulp pressed cardboard? Maybe not.
Push it to the limit!
How about a card made from clear plastic (like the boardgame Gloom) with opaque or translucent printing on one or both sides? Or what if you had your card made from thin metal, laser engraved and cut, so you could bend pieces into a 3d shape? Laser cut wood? 3d printed plastic (perhaps a lithophane that shows a picture when held up to the light). Some interesting things out there using imitation leather, too.
What about using found objects and cutting business card blanks from them? Playing cards? Magazine covers? Cereal boxes? Or using stiffener to make card-like properties in something that usually would be too floppy - like old t-shirt fabric, retro duvet cover fabric, newspaper, yellow-pages, junk mail envelopes. Laminated postit notes or cutout magazine scraps.
Even just considering paper/card itself - why stick with just normal card? What about handmade paper with flowers pressed into the pulp? Or embedded seeds for a product that sprouts local wildflowers when planted in the ground? You can make paper from clothing fibers, from seaweed - from lots of things.
Producing this element: Medium to hard. Depending on the material you choose. There are laser cutting companies that will laser cut thin wood, metal, leather, or different types of card - and a lot of maker spaces have laser engravers and cutters you can train to use. It’d just take time or money, and the print volumes wouldn’t be huge.
For more exotic materials - it’d probably be all hand made - so entirely dependant on your craftiness level and patience.
Viewing it printed: Easy! It’s the underlying medium of the card itself, so you can’t exactly avoid seeing it in person. Some elements (like the smell of laser-engraved wood, or the seeds in an embedded seed paper) may be hard to notice or impossible to grasp in the moment, though.
Viewing digitally: Hard. Impossible? Because it’s the medium itself, you’d need to digitally imitate the look of the material, but you’re not going to get the smell, the texture on your hands, or the ability to flex or bend parts of the card.
Other things that probably don’t fit into other categories:
- Scratch-n-sniff microcapsules. You can buy ‘smell pigment’ and paint it on to surface to get that scratch and sniff effect. Alternatively, there are hundreds of different scratch and sniff stickers you could apply.
- UV-color-changing inks. Pigment that is clear/transparent indoors, but will change color in sunlight! A game you can only play outside in the daytime?
- Temperature changing inks. A game you can only see once you’ve held it between your hands for a moment? Could be neat.