Victoria Calling Cards: Creating Beautiful Business and Calling Cards

by Alice Wong (Editor)

Welcome to the lovely world of calling cards, where sentiments both sweet and practical are presented with an elegant flourish. For business or social exchange, a beautiful, clever card is the easiest and most economical way to promote your business or yourself. whether you are an entrepreneur, an artist, or a craftsperson.

Genres: Nonfiction, Business

96 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1992

Reviews

[Zefyr · Rating 2 out of 5]

Agh, okay, I misread the cover when idly grabbing it off the library shelf, and thought it was about Victorian calling cards. So I thought it was going to be some history and a mini-gallery of calling cards of the Victorian era. Awesome, right? Well, there's about a half dozen pages of that, and most of the rest of it is modern business cards with a few select design notes. Not enough to give you a good grounding in design, but definitely enough to let you know that, for example, sometimes big things need to get balanced out by small things, and sometimes by other big things, and sometimes by white space, but occasionally on yellow cardstock. If you already know some stuff about design it's not a terrible book to get business card ideas going, but it's worth minding that a major design element that's focused on here is the hand-made element...because that's reasonable when running your own business, making each business card?

Ultimately it's not a book written for people with the intention of making business cards for their own business (even less for making personal calling cards); it's for people who like the idea of having a business card that is reasonable and fitting for their dream business. This is reflected in the book's closing with what is ostensibly a starter guide on making your own business card, which is more of a nice little story about how it involves trying out many things until you like something (and where the final product actually has some major design issues that make it look like a bad home design job with pretty clip art), followed by the super-helpful information that there are computer programs you can use to make cards instead of hiring a designer. No information on which programs, or what exactly a designer does, or even why certain choices matter beyond the appearance level when choosing things like ink and color and cardstock for printing.

It's a one-star vanity book as far as the writing, but I'll give it two stars on grounds of still being an interesting collection of business cards - if you already know about design and image and are just trying to think outside of the business cards you're familiar with, it's alright for a few minutes of flipping through.

[April · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful pictures and effective suggestions for designing business cards.