Fold It Up: Unique DIY Business Cards

I’ve been meaning to post this for weeks, but better late than never, right?

When I was at Alt Summit this year, I really wanted to try something different with my business cards for a few reasons. 1) My old cards had information about the exhibition site on them, which isn’t relevant anymore. And 2) I am a little bit over letterpress. I said it. Eeek.

I collected a bunch of gorgeous letterpress cards from people at Alt last year (and this year) and was super proud of the ones that I had Jordan design for me last year. But this year, it just didn’t feel right for me. We all know how expensive letterpress is and to be honest, it is pretty much a standard amongst bloggers at this point. So it’s not unexpected…it’s just a super expensive, well-done card that is (semi) similar to everyone else’s. There is an exception to this rule and I found some really beautiful letterpress cards this year at Alt, but for the sake of this post, I’m just kind of generalizing.

So anyway, I decided to skip letterpress and do something minimal and different. I’ve had this idea in my head since last year’s Alt that I wanted to make a folded poster and that that would be my business card. To be honest, I didn’t think I would have the guts to ever do it because it’s kind of risky. BUT I did! Sort of…

I went with a super minimal black and white business card, which I had printed from Luxe by Moo. Jeff designed them for me, so I could focus on designing the folded poster part. I wanted to be able to include a personal note to each person I gave a card to, so Jeff added long blank boxes to the back of the card, where I could write a message about where we met to remind that person later if they forgot (you meet so many people at Alt, it’s almost impossible to remember everyone).

As for the poster, in an ideal world I would have made this huge (like 18×24 or larger), but I couldn’t figure out how to fold the paper properly at that size AND it would have been extremely expensive. So, I opted for a normal size sheet of paper, professional printed on matte paper.

Then I folded every single sheet, so that my business card could rest inside and create a black triangle that slightly resembles the shape of a house. It took a while to create a design that would line up perfectly, but eventually I figured it out. The poster included an image of one of my most popular DIY projects and some info about me, along with a sentence or two about the party I was hosting at Alt Summit later that week.

Here’s the step by step process of how I folded the posters…

And here’s a video version if you want to see the step by step process all the way through. It’s only 20 seconds, so it won’t take long to watch…

Although there would have been some things I would’ve changed, had I started all over again, I was happy with how they turned out. If nothing else, I can chalk it up to doing something outside of my comfort zone that was a little different that the majority of the business cards I collect at these kinds of things.

What kind of business cards do you dream about creating? 

Photography and video by Sarah Eddy