Business Card

Introduction

For this week's blog post, I created a mock-business card that is reflective of myself and my career path in order to fully demonstrate my knowledge/application of Adobe InDesign. Throughout this post, you will see my step by step process of how I achieved the final product of my business card, and hear some of my retrospective reflections about this experience and the things I learned. 

Set Up

For the set up of this business card project, I used the assistance of Vistaprint, which is a company that helps with the customizable dimensions of many different digital design projects. Following their "Business card standard" layout, I set the dimensions to 3.5" by 2.0" and the bleed to 0.137". As you can see, I chose to use inches instead of any other formatting because of the convenience in case future printing was needed. 

Creating My Project

When creating this business card, I wanted to find images that were representative of my current career path, to give this project a little bit realer of a professional feeling. My major is currently social media and digital communications, with the hopes of working somewhere within the music industry; whether that's managing a label's social medias, marketing strategies, or overseeing touring content for artists. So, I saw it most fit to use a fictional record label in which I could pretend was my own, for the purposes of this project. 

For me I found the most intimidating aspect of this project was remembering all the rights and wrongs when it came to resizing and importing photos. It was at this point that I referred to Adobe's articles explaining this process in depth. From there, I imported the photo, and then utilized the selection tool and dragged the corners of the graphic's frame to resize the image. (Adobe, 2018) In addition to resizing, I also cropped some of the image using the crop tool, and dragging one of the edges/corners to adjust the image to my liking, and clicking enter. (Adobe, 2018) Overall, I found the online resources very reassuring in this process. 

From here, adding text was the easiest part. I located the text tool, and dragged the box to my designated size. I then began typing away, filling the card with professional information such as my name, my title (or in my case my major), and two different ways to contact me. Additionally, I played around with the fonts and colors, something we had not done yet in class. I chose to make my name the only thing in black, so that is where the audience's eyes would gravitate towards first. The rest of the text is red so it can help match the color scheme. Overall this part of the project was done efficiently and with ease. 

Finally, it came time to add an additional photo, this one with a transparent background. Located on the bottom right, I used a image of a vinyl record with red interior, in an attempt to match my color scheme. For obvious reasons, I chose this image as it directly relates to the music world, which is the industry in which I hope to belong to someday. I additionally enjoy a large vintage record collection of my own, so it is very representative of my favorite pass time as well. Locating an image with a transparent background was not foreign for me, as I had done so for many previous slideshow presentation projects, because I like the way it looks. I used the same resizing information as previously stated to help me resize this image so it would perfectly fit in the bottom corner of the card, not taking too much attention away from the overall card. 

What I Learned

There is much to be said about what I learned throughout this project, and I would argue to say that this project both challenged me the most, and was one of the best learning experiences I have had in this class thus far. I feel like because this was so challenging and unnatural to me, I did tons more research and really dove into these steps and different ways to go about this project. Although it could have been a pain at times, I definitely learned the most doing this project. I would also like to emphasize the key ideas to remember, which for me were properly resizing an image without distorting it, utilizing the bleed lines and margins, and having a deep understanding of the tools and what each of them can help you do. These are also very crucial for the future printing process as well. 

Upon reflection, I am very satisfied with my business card, as I had very low expectations in both the finished product and my abilities coming into this project. Although I had some issues initially with resizing the images, using the articles and videos given to us made a world of difference; and, despite having some setbacks this project did not take me long at all to complete. Overall, to my surprise, I really enjoyed completing this assignment, and I look forward to challenging myself further to continually test and improve my design skills.