With my recent development of focus on getting the Tailfish By Pyry Etsy store up and running, and the fact that I have joined the Female Entrepreneur Association and the Awesome Business Club (it’s all about self-development don’t you know) I realised that I am probably going to be meeting more people and attending more networking events. I also realised that I needed to make sure I am able to share my latest contact info when I am out and about. So the desire for new, more relevant business cards was born! Luckily this coincided with a review opportunity when auraprint.uk contacted me to offer the chance to design my own business cards, in exchange for a review. Perfect timing and not one to say no when the universe throws shiny things at me I said yes. All views in this review post are honest and my own!
Of course, before you can have business cards you need to have a bit of a ponder on your branding, and it was at this point I was glad I stumbled across the Business Beautician (a fellow Awesome Business Clubber) who was offering a brand quiz on her Instagram. It was simple, fun and the output reinforced some ideas I had about Tailfish, both the blog and the store. She gives a great little summary printable highlighting key points too align with your brand’s personality and one of the highlights was around font use. So I used this to design my new Tailfish logo, and decide on the fonts I wanted to use for that and the text on my new business cards.
Auraprint.uk are a small firm based up in Huddersfield and they were great to work with throughout the process. I had decided that I wanted to use their Impakt Colour Core cards as the basis for my new business cards. There are 6 colours available and I went with red, not only because I love bright colours, but I felt it would work well with the plans that were forming in my mind. The cards can be printed on a double-sided basis, which gives you plenty of scope to be creative. I decided to go with a big, bold logo on one side and my contact information on the other.
As part of my logo design I had used the Adobe Capture app on my phone (free if you have a Creative Cloud account) and used this to choose my colour palette. This resulted in me choosing a bold orange for the logo, and a greenish colour for the contact font. The awesome thing with the app is it then gives you the colour codes of each colour (in a range of formats) which is great from a design perspective as it enabled me to be really specific with the information I was giving the auraprint team.
As part of the ordering process you load your design files to the site, providing details of how you want things put together. I tested them to the limit by being very specific on the colours I wanted, but also tried to help them as much as possible by providing the files of the fonts that I wanted to use. I also asked if they were able to use social media style icons on the cards, rather than using words to highlight which contact info related to what. Once they had all the details of what I wanted they scurried off into action.
They pulled the design together and sent a proof through for review. I was really impressed! The colours looked great, the fonts were exactly as I had requested…there was a minor typo though (and to be honest I wasn’t surprised, everyone always spells Kathryn wrong) and I had become Katheryn. No bother though, I let them know of the error and it was quickly corrected. A fresh approval proof was issued and we were good to go.
A couple of days later the cards arrived, 4 boxes, well packaged and looking great. They were exactly what I had asked for and the quality is spot one. The cards are really thick and feel nice to the touch, the coloured centre really makes them stand out too.
They also received positive feedback from others when I was at the She Means Business book launch on Wednesday night. Everyone I gave a card to really liked them, the sturdiness and solid feel received positive comments and the coloured centre really made them stand out from the crowd. The information is clear and I think they are a really good representation of my brand! I can’t wait to go to more events and share them with people.
From end to end, the auraprint team were a pleasure to deal with, you can really tell that they care about design and printing and I am sure if you had any questions about how the process works, or needed advice on how to best plan your business cards or other design needs they would be more than happy to guide you. At the moment I don’t have plans to professionally print my printables, but if I do decide to change that in future then I would definitely get in touch with them and see how they could help bring Tailfish By Pyry to life even more. Please do check them out if you are looking for new business cards, let them help bring your brand to life too!