I’m going to a conference for the first time ever. I will probably meet a lot of people. Maybe I would like some of them to remember me. So I made a business card.

Quick:
- what’s my email address?
- what are you thinking about?
- intrigued or annoyed?

Also, I am particularly interested in your thoughts on:
- font choice. IANAFN, but I like fonts sometimes. I basically want the feel of just writing this in courier, but I don’t want people to think I’m a computer-cluster linux-kernel-hacker long-hair nerd-rager. I considered Futura (but it was too art-deco retro or something), Frutiger (less interesting and I couldn’t find it for download in 5 minutes), Gill Sans (for some reason I thought it was associated with macs?), and Yanone Kaffeesatz (too narrow to fill the space). I went with Droid Sans, as it seemed at least as good as anything else to my untrained eye, and it might subtly make people think Android. If they do think Android, that’s good; I dig Android (and Google)’s philosophy (obviously), and anything I do will probably involve using Android a lot.

- spacing between “dan” and “tasse”. I was going to try to make it a half-space or something, squash the words together a bit, because otherwise people might wonder “is it dan_tasse@gmail or something?” but that was not trivial to do, so I skipped it.

- spacing and borders in general. Anything look too close or far from the borders of the card? (note that it  will not have a border; if you see a double line around it, that’s an artifact of blogger)

- should I leave off the twitter? I use it wayyy less than gmail, and right now all it does is post when I blog a new research blog. But I’d like to start using it for research/business/etc more, as it seems a good tool for that.

Comments:

Pete - Apr 6, 2011

I am a little baffled by the space in between your first and last names, not to a “it doesn’t work” level but a “wait what’s his email? i think it might be this, but I’m not sure” level.

Can you do colors/bold? Like dantasse or something? Keep them together but make sure your names are seperate? I think that would clear up that one ambiguity I have.

Personally I’d give more space from the border for your name, too, even if you have to sacrifice size. It feels jammed on the left side to me.

I see you have another one, and I think I like it better (though my comment about the name still stands).

Dan - Apr 6, 2011

Thanks! This one is old news, though. Now I guess all these concerns are secondary to “can I fit it in the middle of the barcode?”

It might cause a bit of confusion. But I guess if someone wants to contact me, they’ll figure it out, and if not, no worries.