Global Moxie

This week, I finally got around to printing a new set of business cards. I get painfully shy when I'm designing something for myself. Go figure: I shoot off my mouth about other people’s brands and, when I have the time, enjoy churning out designs to match. But to make something that describes me... Impossible. Vaguely terrifying.

As a result, I treat my own marketing materials with benign neglect, deferring design work until some event thumps its shoe on the table and demands action.

This time around, that event is the South by Southwest (SXSW) interactive festival in Austin, Texas, where I’m headed on Friday. SXSW is the premier rendezvous for interactive designers and web nerds. It’s five days with lots of smart people, lots of fresh ideas, and lots of beer. The idea of showing up at this fandango with a fistful of my dreary old cards made me shudder. And so, here we go... new cards.

Here’s what I came up with, along with some of the thoughts that informed the design.

The brand

There are a lot of vibes that I’ve tried to distill in the Global Moxie brand, most recently in this site’s redesign. I wanted these elements to be reflected in the business card, too. It turns out to be a lot of message to pack into 7.5 square inches of card stock. The rundown:

Global Moxie = Josh Clark

Business card, circa 1895. From SSA History Archives by way of Wikipedia.

Once upon a time, I was purposely vague about the fact that I’m a one-man show. I worried that customers might get cold feet about signing up with something less than a corporate monolith. I was wrong. I’ve discovered that lots of people like the accountability associated with dealing directly with the guy who makes the software. Like me, they enjoy the personal nature of the transaction and the relationship that follows.

For better or worse, my ugly mug is the face of Global Moxie. From a brand perspective, the identification between me and the company is important.

Creative, playful

I make stuff for people who make stuff. You, me, we’re all creative here. Sure, we’re serious about our work, but we like to have a little fun along the way. I aim to make humane, friendly interfaces, and the brand should be equally friendly.

Technical

Behind the play, I’d like to think that there’s also a wealth of expertise, even science, in the work that I do. The brand needs to emphasize knowledge, experimentation and new ideas.

Non-corporate

Happily, my little world never involves sales calls. I give out cards almost exclusively at conferences, or to folks I meet socially who happen to be desperate for easy web-publishing software. That means that the people who see my cards are almost always from my own tribe: designers, coders, artists and other assorted nerds. These cards are not for suits. They need not be “safe.”

Main offering = Big Medium

Finally, there’s what I actually do. My main gig these days is developing and supporting Big Medium, and that’s generally the topic when I hand someone a card. The card needs to be a big fat reminder about Big Medium and what it does.

The design

To identify myself with the brand, I decided to actually picture myself on the card, or at least the cartoon version of me. Picking up on the “hypertext laboratory of Josh Clark” copy from the site, I went with the scientist image from the Projects page in an attempt to marry the playful with the technical.

That image also has the benefit of including the fist and test tube from the Global Moxie logo. I decided not to include that logo at all on the card, letting my mad scientist carry the brand instead.

The scientist also informed my job title. When you’re the only guy in the company, you can have pretty much any title you like, so I went with “chief scientist.” (It’s a little kitschy, I know, but my friend Richard points out that it’s at least better than “catalyst,” which some of his hapless architect friends have on their cards.)

For contact info, I just have my web URL and e-mail. No mailing address or phone. A couple of reasons: First, address and phone can change, and leaving them off gives the cards a longer shelf life. Second, color me 19th-century, but I’m not a fan of the telephone; I prefer to do business with the written word. In rare moments when I’m feeling generous with my phone number, there’s always room on the card to draw a speech bubble with my digits.

I selected Gill Sans for the font, a clean and friendly typeface with historical connotations of communication and connection -- it’s the typeface of the BBC and was patterned on the London Underground font.

And finally, I gave over the entire back of the card to Big Medium and its genie icon, with a full-bleed, dark green field.

The process

Printing full-color business cards is lots easier than it was just a few years ago. I went with VistaPrint, a digital-printing outfit that lets you upload a single Photoshop image to their website; no fussing with spot colors or four-color separation. Just make sure that it’s a CMYK image, and you’re done. The cards turned up in my mailbox seven days later.

And baby, it’s cheap. With a first-timer promotion, I got 500 cards for $35 plus tax and shipping, and that includes springing for their heavyweight paper stock. (VistaPrint does have a French site, but even with international shipping, the US site proved to be cheaper.)

The end result

The print quality could have been a bit better, but hey, at this price, I can’t really complain. Some of the cards have a few flecks of toner spatter on the front. The dark-green background on the back prints ever-so-slightly unevenly on the back, with some white specks of paper showing through.

This probably isn’t stuff that others would notice, but I did. If I were doing it all over again, I’d probably either ditch the background color on the back or choose a lighter color.

All in all, though, I’m tickled by the result. My pal Brad tells me that the cards are “daringly non-corporate,” which suits me just fine.

Tags: conference, design, josh, marketing, sxsw