Beautiful, beautiful work by Dutch/Australian design studio, Toko.

Lovely branding & typography from all-in-one design shop, Telegramme Studio.

photo by monda loves

In a few days I’ll be heading to Salt Lake City for Alt. If you haven’t heard of Alt, here’s the deal: it’s a conference for design and lifestyle bloggers, business who want to blog, businesses who want to meet bloggers, etc. I signed up about 3 weeks ago, and then realized I’d need to come up with business cards. Like, yesterday. First I thought I’d be really fancy and get some letterpress cards, but the more I thought about it the more I started having serious commitment anxiety. They’re expensive, so I wanted to love them, but I didn’t have a whole lot of time to spend on designing them, I’m considering a re-brand, and, oh yeah, they’re expensive. So I started exploring DIY options, and came up with some fun ones (which I’ll share tomorrow on Mint after I photograph them).

That leads me to today’s post. If you’re a designer, you know how hard it is to design for yourself. So much pressure! But, when you need cards in a pinch (or have multiple business that need cards), maybe the best thing to do is something fun. Something that was fun to make and looks fun in the end, not so perfectly letterpressed or offset or diecut or whatever. A small run, something you can switch up next time. Here are a few ideas to get you started.

Myf Kemp made these cards using recycled envelopes.  
 

Eugene Radomski used cardboard and (I’m assuming) a rubber stamp or screenprint.
 
 

Sassen used rubber stamps, and what I love about these is that they’re designed to be easy to print without worrying about registration.
 
 

The Rabbit & the Duck pulled out the sewing machine to make these cards.
 
 

Of course, if you have a screenprint or gocco set up, it’s easy. But these, by Gold Lunchbox, could have been made with a rubber stamp and a circle punch.
 
 

Dailey Crafton used cereal boxes and his Epson.
 
 

Michael Faber’s business cards weren’t DIY, but the edge painting was! He pulled out an orange highlighter and just went at it.

For more ideas, check out my Mint post on hand-stamped cards, and this post on DIY stamped hangtag business cards on Design Sponge. Lena Corwin’s book Printing by Hand is a good resource for making your own stamps, and she did a quick online tutorial here. Brendan and I are going to be spray painting some cards tomorrow for OK Great to use at Alt, and we’ll let you know how those turn out, too. If you’ve got some handmade cards to share, we’d love to see them!

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Howdy Do It came from “how do you do It,” the question Ellie & Margot found themselves asking about their freelance lifestyles, and so Howdy Do It was born, a weekly column about the things we do to keep ourselves organized, inspired and on track. Ellie will be here each Monday, and Margot will be over on Mint at the same time.

Part & Parcel:

Labour:

DEMO:

New College Beat:

I landed in NYC a week or so ago to the bad news that Rad Mountain has moved out of their space and onto greener pastures. Damien Correll and Garrett Morin have joined forces to create Part & Parcel, Wyeth Hansen has teamed up with Ryan Dunn and is now sharing a space with Athletics as Labour. Justin Fines is holding down DEMO and the only link I can find for Ryan Waller is New College Beat

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It’s Guest Post time again! This time around is Chad Kouri, member of The Post Family and personally one of my most favorite-est people. We decided to do a little swap this week and we actually traded some items on our to-do lists. So Chad’s putting together some posts for me this week and I’m helping him do some layout for the next issue of Proximity Magazine. It’s even a Howdy Do It experiment of sorts, and it’s been a nice change of pace to help him out instead of getting bogged down with my own work. Enjoy!

There’s no way I’m the first to rave about iamalwayshungry but add me to fan club cause this work is the shiz. His website reminds me a whole lot of what web used to be like back in the heydays of Flash, but way better and with a completely modern spin. Jeez, and talk about prolific too, dude’s got something for everyone. Via Redyawning.

Yo yo yo, look what Nick Campbell & I made! Well mostly Nick is responsible for this iPhone app, but he needed some design help so we jammed out this cute little icon for ShakeItPhoto. And it’s only .99¢ in the app store. Cause who doesn’t want Polaroid for the iPhone? Also check out the ShakeItPhoto flickr page as well as PhotoShakeDown for lots of cool inspiration on what people are doing with ShakeItPhoto.

Aaaaand here’s Nick doing a walk-through of 1.1’s features. Plus I just think Nick’s videos are entertaining too.