As part of Cucumber’s continuing evolution and as part of my role I’ve just finished the design of the new business cards and figured it might be nice to talk about the reasoning behind the new design and my theories and process on business card design.
Tell me a story
I believe that a business card should create a little story and a memorable exchange when handed over, the worst thing to happen when cards are exchanged is for there to be a disinterested air where the card isn’t even looked at. The card should offer an opportunity for a little discussion and an excuse to create a human friendly dialog before the business stuff ensues, I like that this breaks down those artificial business awkwardness’s that sometimes happens.
There are several ways to get your card a second look, the first is to go for some impressive stock, or printing technique, something that says that “I like fine things and am prepared to pay for them”. You can also plug in all those super fine slick design styling that also tell of your superior judgment and refinement,. or you can have a bit of a play and try and express your playful humanity. There is also the option to combine this and that and a bit of the other. There are also many other approaches but that’s an article in itself.
For these the story is that I wanted to show the whole team and communicate that we are all Cucumber. The main problem was in getting all these busy folks together at one time in a location where I could photograph them with out some joker pulling a daft face or flipping the bird.
Little people
I was looking at some of my photos from a personal project where I photograph Mushrooms and had made these little people to throw out the scale of the mushrooms, and figured I would just miniaturize every one and paint there likeness’s so that was what I did. I did get some funny looks as the crazy haired funny fellow in the corner of the office painting tiny people of less then a centimeter, but they soon saw the fun in it.
The shape
As a special company I didn’t want us to go for the normal format, I wanted something that was playful. Initially I had intended on playing with the Cucumber logo as a circular card shape, then the idea of making 4 cards fit together with the seeds cut out, but alas the printers couldn’t make that work. Back to the drawing board, it had to be something that played with the cucumber shape without explicitly looking like a cucumber, I wanted something slightly more feminine looking to counteract the common perception of our industry being masculine.
The typography
The primary type face was driven by desire and practicality, the desire was to have a softer, playful more cursive typeface the practicality was that I also wanted to start introducing this typeface online in dynamic web sites so looked about and decided that Lobster from Google’s Font Directory offered me the chance to use a nice font on and of line without issue and fuss.
