Hi, I’m Pat McGrew and this is another episode of Print Sample TV. This time we’re going to talk about print samples from a slightly different point of view. Every one of us in business carries business cards and sometimes we do the less expensive approach of plain text on a white card stock.

Sometimes we get a little bit more creative though and I’m going to recommend that if you’re in the printing industry, you should be doing things that are more creative, more representative of what you do for a living.

So I got a card from a lovely woman called Janne Hogshoj. So she’s the Danish Connection. And one of the things that caught my eye about this business card is not only this amazing picture of Janne amongst all of her print samples. I met her at the Danish Sign, Print and Pack show this year and she is an institution in Denmark.

She knows all the paper vendors and she has some of the most amazing print samples. I was amazingly jealous. But her business card almost gives her whole life history on the back of it. It tells you how you can connect with her. It tells you what she can help educate you about. It tells you what you need to know to interact with Janne. And, and I just, I thanked her so much for this business card because it not only helped me understand the power of the business card, but it helped me understand what someone who thinks out of the box can do with their business card.

So while you might be inclined to just put your name, your phone number, maybe your LinkedIn connecting information, Janne has given us a whole history of how to work with her. And I loved it.

So it made me think about other business cards that I’ve seen that really do an amazing job of linking the person to how you interact with that person. And so the team at Fuji Xerox have been making very good use of their Iridesse. The Iridesse is capable of printing not only cyan, magenta, yellow and black, but also gold, silver. It has all sorts of effects that it can achieve with different kinds of clear toners. And I just am so impressed with some of the cards that I’ve seen. And so it’s not just all the name and address information, but it’s some really great vignettes in the back, on the back of the card. I think they do a great job.

Now my friends at HP also did some really interesting things with their business cards this year. And one of the things that caught my eye, my friend Bob Rouse from HP, he works with the Indigo team out of the US and if you look at this, this is actually a business card that is multidimensional.

It not only has mosaic on the back. So if you know mosaic, this is a tool that you can get from HP that allows you to create a master image and then use different segments of that image so that every piece you produce is completely personalized and unique. And so this is what Bob has done, so every one of the business cards he was carrying around was completely unique. And yet all of his contact details were there. And because he did it on this material on this substrate and finished it the way he did, you know exactly what he wants to talk to you about.

Now, another friend of mine from HP, Mauricio Ferrerian is in Brazil and when I was at the Epigraph show earlier this year, he was talking about Pack Ready, which is another HP product for the packaging industry. And so it’s a little hard to see, but this is actually a flex pack envelope that is using the substrate of the flex pack. And it is, there is no doubt in your mind what Mauricio wants to talk to you about. He also has a lovely picture of the machine and the finishing equipment on the back.

So think about your business card. What does it say about you? What does it say about what you are trying to bring to the market? If you do packaging, maybe little boxes, if you’re doing labels, make sure that you have some sort of business cards that are also labels to help people associate with you. And if are someone like Janne, who just contains multitudes, let everybody know what your multitudes are.

I’m Pat McGrew for Print Sample TV. Come back next time.