Reuse-friendly Business Cards

This gallery of interesting and creative business cards was on Neatorama a very long time ago. There’s some really nice examples here, and there are many other galleries out there with lots of cool ideas. Some of them are functional, some are more about the “design” rather than being, y’know, readable.

Several years ago, all the talk was about Hipster PDA’s and the like. One idea which I started using was to use my old business cards as notelets to write reminders to myself. In my line of work, I get a box of business cards. I’m not really “client facing”, so I will usually give away a maximum of 50 out of the box of 500 before my title, phone number, or office address changes. Then I’m left with 450 obsolete cards. I hate throwing stuff like that away, so they get used for shopping lists and the like. A Hipster PDA Mini, perhaps. I started another new job in January last year, and I’ve been clearing out my drawers, so once again I find myself with a near-full box of obsolete cards.

So to avoid this in future, how about making business cards with the maximum amount of reuse possibilities? You could put a calendar on the back – this Flickr set shows one (slightly complex) possibility for a business card calendar. But that’s only one year. Here’s a few other possibilities:

  • Generic calendar table
  • Tipping chart (useful for those of us who struggle with the percentages)
  • A nice list for making to-do or shopping lists, with tick boxes
  • 1/4″ ruling with a 1/4″ margin – good for lists or general notes
  • 1/4″ grid – maximum flexibility!

Here’s the first suggestion – a generic calendar table. This is a calendar that is not fixed to a particular month, but can be easily marked to show the dates for any month in the past or future.

Generic Calendar Table - Blank

_____________________
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728 F
2930 A,J,S,N31MONTH:

The parts in italic would be written in manually, giving a functional calendar. The little letters next to 28 and 30 remind us which months have that many days. Here’s the calendar marked up for March 2014.

Generic Calendar Table - March 2014

SatSunMonTueWedThuFri
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728 F
2930 A,J,S,N31MONTH: March 2014

I like this idea. Would it be worth doing? Probably not. Nice little exercise in what-if though.