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Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

olivierpieters.be

91–100 of 223 posts

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#91

If you're going to go through all the trouble of typesetting a business card in LaTeX, you really ought to use Computer Modern Roman so that folks know you typeset it in LaTeX. (Related; resumes in CMR always have +10 credibility.)

Computer Modern is now one of the most overused typefaces on the planet. It looks great for that “Victorian-era American-style math paper” look. People should mostly avoid it otherwise, IMO. There are plenty of better alternatives for typesetting pretty mathematics. * * * More generally about the thread here, TeX is not a productive or effective tool for making business cards or other heavily graphical documents. The…

Compared to Times New Roman? Arial/Helvetica? Calibri? Comic Sans and Papyrus?

I'd hardly put Computer Modern in anywhere near the same category.

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those particular RGB colors map well into the CMYK gamut and will be readily printed by any competent printer using a 4-color process. https://support.dma.ucla.edu/help/tutorials/print_color_guid... has more information on the two color spaces' overlap. The front side design is very tolerant of inherent printing tolerances, but the backside design is poor (in that it will highlight, rather than hide, the inherent tol…

Wow! Thanks for that link. It matches with my experience over the years. I think choosing in-gamut colors to start is a good practice though. It saves frustration later on. Otherwise agreed on all points. Nice post!

NP. I do have a fair amount of relevant experience in the space: almost 14 years working for what is almost surely the highest volume seller of business cards online. ;)

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#93
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use it when I need to write some documents (user guides etc...). If the alternative is open office or some other "WYSIWYG" editor I'll take LaTeX any time. I don't really love it though, I find myself using org-mode more and more for that purpose, then I let emacs generate the latex code for my doc. It's not nearly as flexible but it works well and your source is a lot more readable. I also use LaTeX for my resume,…

If you're converting Org documents to PDF, you can use Pandoc ( http://pandoc.org/ ) to automatically convert & send through pdfLaTeX.

Thanks, that looks useful. But org-mode's built in "org-latex-export-to-pdf" worked well enough for me so far.

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#94
Vertical card layouts look cool, but they aren't very practical for people with longer names or surnames.

To me this design seems right if you're English or Chinese, but try using it with your Greek or Basque name, or with the Spanish tradition of double (maternal and paternal) surnames.

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#96

These are really beautiful business cards. But man, does anybody actually get value out of their business cards? No interesting opportunity has ever come up for me as a result of sharing business cards. At some point I stopped taking them with me. I still have a bunch of them in my desk drawer, they're very outdated, and I only use them for grocery lists. Is that just me, or are business cards going out of fashion in…

> Is that just me, or are business cards going out of fashion in general?

Because you don't do business obviously.

When you go to events, business shows, networking events, conferences, hiring fair... you give business cards to your contact so they can remember who you are and contact you back. It is very important.

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#97
post #77
post #30

Has anyone ever used QR codes on the business cards or store doors? It seems like a waste of space, you need to have a special app on your phone to read it. I think most people don't use that.

As an iOS user, I always assumed QR code reading was just built into Android's camera app. Is that not so?

Nope. Can't read QR code an android out of the box.

You need to get 1 out of 100 applications from the app store, that competes for the one who can shows the most ads and be the least effective at decoding the picture.

Are you saying that the iPhone camera can read QR code out of the box?

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#98
post #66

If you're going to go through all the trouble of typesetting a business card in LaTeX, you really ought to use Computer Modern Roman so that folks know you typeset it in LaTeX. (Related; resumes in CMR always have +10 credibility.)

Computer Modern is a hideous font. It's particularly terrible when rendered in Postscript/PDF, which is how almost all documents produced with it actually get read. But the +10 credibility is absolutely true. It's like CS grunge style: when you wear ugly clothes, you look more authentic.

How is Computer Modern much worse than, say, Times New Roman?

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#99
post #30

Has anyone ever used QR codes on the business cards or store doors? It seems like a waste of space, you need to have a special app on your phone to read it. I think most people don't use that.

Right; I mean, I guess I could scan it to find out - but what is it, a link to OP's website?

What could it possibly be that's easier to convey through a QR code - especially given that it's on a bit of paper you can keep.

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#100

I made mine using LaTeX for VL/HCC 2016. It's on http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/blog/VLHCC2016.html I repeated enough times to fill a page, printed it, and cut the cards.

Nice environment! But...why do justified on a webpage?

Thanks.

I think the pages look better when justified. Also, the width is about the same as a typical book, so you don't have to move your eyes much when reading it.

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