CloudContacts Blog

The title of this post raises an interesting question – does the color of a business card matter? In the past we’ve explored whether the type of material used for a business card matters (my answer is not really) but what about just the color of the stock?

Stephan Barrett from ColourLovers takes a look at what was the standard many years ago and how some are using color effectively on today’s business card. While all of Stephan’s examples are from his clients (a bit disappointing), they give you some basic ideas of what color can do for a business card.

If you need inspiration for color usage, do some searches on Flickr for “xyz color business cards” – for example, here’s a link to a search for Yellow Business Cards with tons of examples.

In our processing center, the majority of business cards we see are white – or white with a colored company logo. I think small pops of color can do wonders for making sure the card gets noticed. There may be times where you leave a few cards behind on a conference table or booth and a card with a vibrant color can draw attention to it – especially more than a boring, black text on white card.

Many times adding some color doesn’t even cost that much more – in fact, if you print a 4-color card for your logo to be in color, adding some more color on the card shouldn’t cost anything extra. Changing the paper stock will probably incur a charge but it might be worth investigating.

So the next time you are printing your own cards or cards for your company, consider using some color.

One of our awesome customers, Dave Michels, wrote a good post today on the CloudAve blog. He briefly mentions that he uses CloudContacts (thanks Dave!) – he also wrote a full review of CloudContacts which you can read here.

The meat of his post discusses whether the business card is dead and you can tell from his title, “long live the business card” which choice he believes. Dave talks about some of the new options for passing contact information including QR codes, the original beam app from the old Palm days and newer technologies that some conferences are trying out to have attendees share their contact information.

It’s always interesting to read people’s opinion on whether business cards are dead or alive.

Earlier this month Google launched their latest entry into the social media/networking arena with Google+. I am excited to announce that we’ve launched a new business card contact export option for Google+. It’s super fast to use and will help you grow your userbase on the new Google Plus social network.

Here are the three simple steps to import your business card contacts into Google+:

1. login to your CloudContacts account and select the Google+ export on the left menu:

2. login to your Google+ account, click the Circles option on the top menu bar then select Find and Invite then select Upload Address Book.

3. find the CloudContacts file you saved and Google will begin to import your contacts. You will see (as shown below), the contacts have a green icon and appear to be displayed at the bottom of the recommendations list. You can add the new contacts to your Circles or share content with them.

The Google+ exporter is free for all CloudContacts accounts – if you aren’t one of our awesome customers yet, what are you waiting for? Signup today.

The team at AcrisDesign put together a list of 50 very well-designed letterpress business cards. We don’t see a lot of letterpress business cards arriving at our office for processing but when they do, they typically have a very nice style and design. These cards have a heavier weight than traditional business cards and sometimes are very rigid due to the card thickness. Interestingly, these cards also usually offer less data on them versus traditional business cards — sometimes just a name is provided!

And in case you were wondering, yes we can process all of your letterpress business cards.

Here’s one example of a letterpress business card from the list:

To help get more business cards out into the world (so that we can process them!), I found a deal from Staples that is worth checking out. Staples is offering 100 free black and white business cards from today through June 18th. Just print out this coupon, take it into your local Staples store and the copy center employees will help get your order placed and printed.

There are two great parts of this deal:

1. If you normally use Vista Print for free cards that include the Vista Print url on the back, this deal will get you cards that look a bit more professional.
2. The coupon value ($20) can be applied to any business card order so if you decide to print color or with other options, you can just use the coupon towards the purchase.

If you already have business cards, you might use this deal to run a test with another business card concept for yourself or your company.