MOO

In the 9 years that I’ve been running 22i design I don’t recall ever having any business cards. That may sound a bit strange but we’ve honestly never really had the need for them.

However, with the latest upturn in business (thanks to all the good people who’ve recommended us) plus recently designing the classy little business cards for ICCTS I decided to dip my toes in the water and thought I’d give the much talked about MOO a try.

Compared to the normal process of designing business cards, where you completely craft the artwork from scratch and send it to your friendly neighbourhood printer, (in our case Charterlith Printers in Fleet) MOO is a simple automated online affair where you pick the type of card you want, upload the artwork, type some text in and then pay.

One of our web clients uses the well-known Vistaprint service for their stationery. You can tell that the print quality and design/style is below what you pay for regular design & print but there is a market out there for cheap business cards.

So whilst we’d dearly love to have dreamt up something along the lines of any one of the 100 really creative business cards (our logo would look great with a bit of spot varnish on a completely matt card) all we’re trying to do here is test out the budget end of the market and, all-in, we paid around £14.04 for 50 double-sided 350gsm 100% recycled card TCF business cards to be printed and delivered (by next Thursday). That’s about 28p a card.

The process was relatively painless but, as a designer, you miss the total control you have over the creative process. There were, for instance, only a dozen or so fonts to choose from and only line-by-line options (for example you can’t increase the weight of, italicise certain words or letters or switch fonts or font sizes).

It’s all very simple and templated however, for the price, you can’t complain so I’ll report back when they arrive; I’m sure they’ll “do the job”.