A Business Card that Rises to the Occasion
One of the most basic functions of a business card is to make you stand out.
If a prospective client has ten different cards laid out on his desk and needs his washroom redesigned ASAP, you want to make sure your business card is the first one he'll be visually drawn to and, hopefully, the last one he'll have to look at.
When it comes to business card printing, having a card that sticks out can have just as much to do with the printing process as it has to do with fancy colour schemes and a clever logo design.
With the advent of the bubble jet color printer, full color printing has emerged as the easiest and cheapest alternative for professional business cards. However, aside from eye-catching graphic design, entrepreneurs and professional are looking to raised letter printing. This is the ideal process for those who literally want their professionalism to jump right off their business cards.
The main difference between the two has to do with the way the ink is applied to the business card stock.
Raised-letter printing employs a method known as thermography. In essence, every colour is printed on separate plates that are added to the presses one at a time, which produces and ink that actually stands up off the page. Full colour printing, on the other hand, is a simultaneous process, where colours are combined to create hues, shadows and photo images.
Much like your inkjet printouts, it's therefore impossible to distinguish what was on the page just by feeling it with your fingers. However, you would actually be able to feel the letters on a business card that had been printed using thermography.
So what does this all mean? Full colour printing tends to come across as sharper and more upbeat. Therefore, if you are a real-estate agent or a hairdresser looking to portray such an image, the cheaper, full-colour alternative may work better for you.
However, lawyers and doctors who want to give their business cards that sort of old, carved-in-stone elegance (which seems to compliment their professions) tend to be drawn to raised letter printing. This method seems to be especially complimentary when using rich, solid colours - such as burgundy or grey - on a thick card stock.
Although the raised-letter printing is actually better suited for professionals trying to please their clientele as opposed to seeking out a new one, full colour printing has been proven to get more favourable responses from prospective clients.
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