Law Librarians of Leisure

In the interest of investigative journalism, I’ve explored two options for getting business cards for as little expense as possible. I’ve gotten used to handing out business cards and wanted to continue doing so, especially in light of the fact that I was going to AALL. So I became your guinea pig. See what I’m willing to do for y’all?

Per Jim Milles’ suggestion in the comments from the first post on business cards, I went to Vista Prints to see about their offer of 250 free business cards. The offer is a pretty good one: you get 250 cards printed free as long as you don’t mind the Vista Print logo on the back of the card and you pay for processing and shipping. If you are patient and can wait three weeks to get the cards, the whole thing will cost you about $5. If you are impatient like me and want them in 2 weeks, it’s about $10. If you are a sucker for a clean design (also like me…ahem) and don’t want the Vista Prints logo on the back, it’s an additional $3 or so. There are lots of designs to choose from and I was quite pleased with some of the options. It’s an additional $10 if you want to play around with the font and spacing, but I managed to be satisfied with the design by ignoring what they said goes where and not filling in all of the fields. The free version is matte, though you can pay extra for glossy (I didn’t). I’ll let you know how they turn out when they come – though if you are at AALL, I’ll probably just make you take one if I really like them.

I also went to Staples to get the 40 free business cards (I warned you I was impatient). I had come up with a design I liked using a template in Microsoft Word (though I must confess I liked it less once I saw the snazzy ones from Vista Print). It was fairly simple, though it did take some time. I took my flash drive in loaded with the business cards I made. However, Staples had to reformat them to fit the machine that cuts the cards (ah, no, I don’t know how to create them so they wouldn’t have to reformat them). This actually resulted in some information getting cut off the bottom of my card but hey, it’s ok, I probably needed strictly personal cards anyway considering I have 250 more business-oriented ones coming in two weeks. (Full disclosure: they offered to reformat them again to get the information on there. I declined, mostly because…well, I think we’ve covered that trait of mine.) The cards are glossy on the front and matte on the back. You need to hurry to take advantage of the offer since it ends June 13. I took a print out of the web page in just to make sure. One clerk at my store knew about and one didn’t.

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