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Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

olivierpieters.be

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Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#191

Post by Manozco »

irfansharif wrote: post #45
opieters wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this need not be the case. When creating this, I wanted it to look good and the way I wanted it. Not make it scream "LaTeX". For a CV, Computer Modern might be more apt since there's also more text on it. But again, why make it scream LaTeX if one can do it more subtle and make it more personal at the same time? Do note that I have a LaTeX PDF style CV as well, but it's not linked in the article (nor availabl…

> Do note that I have a LaTeX PDF style CV as well, but it's not linked in the article (nor available online). any particular reason why? i for one would love to see it.

If you want to see one in LateX, here is mine: http://manu.vives.fr/

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#192

Post by Tharkun »

chrisseaton wrote: post #35
jakobegger wrote: post #20

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 I still have a bunch of them in my desk drawer, they're very outdated, and I only use them for grocery lists.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…

Don't travel to Japan without business cards. It's really awkward when everyone gives you one and asks for one back, as I think exchanging them is an important part of meeting someone there.

Indeed. Remember: accept them with both hands and briefly inspect them. It's the polite thing to do.

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#194

Post by err4nt »

bcarlton0 wrote: post #137

Mine is a PCB (Printed Circuit Board). I designed it with KiCAD. Open source CC-BY-NC-SA. https://github.com/bdc0/businesscard

I took graphic design in school (so I've seen plenty of business card concepts) and I just wanted to say that's the most creative card I've seen in years! I'd cherish something like that if you gave it to me - no matter how much they cost the impact is definitely worth it. Wow!

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#195

Post by nextos »

FabHK wrote: post #186
nextos wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Good TeX should simply yield to good typography. Nice ligations, etc. I dont like Computer Modern too much. I am very fond of Gentium [1]. For math, I love Euler [2], which is used in Concrete Mathematics. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentium [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMS_Euler

BTW, I assumed you meant "ligatures" (for joined letters)? (Not sure what "ligations" are - maybe autocorrect... :-)

I did, I should be more careful. Thanks. Too late to edit though :)

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#196

Post by nextos »

kzrdude wrote: post #172
nextos wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Good TeX should simply yield to good typography. Nice ligations, etc. I dont like Computer Modern too much. I am very fond of Gentium [1]. For math, I love Euler [2], which is used in Concrete Mathematics. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentium [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMS_Euler

Doesn't Euler look a tad cartoony to you? I guess that goes away when you are used to it.

It does. It is intended to mimic handwriting in blackboards. I use it for slides when teaching or presenting to informal audiences.

If you don't like it, a good alternative to Computer Modern is Latin Modern. A nice derivative which is not so thin. Reading long Computer Modern texts gets a bit tiring for my eyes. I think some editors like LyX default to Latin Modern instead of Computer Modern.

Aside, The Art of Prolog uses an amazing Lucida variant. It'd be my favorite for math texts if it was free.

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#197

Post by nextos »

kaeluka wrote: post #180
nextos wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Good TeX should simply yield to good typography. Nice ligations, etc. I dont like Computer Modern too much. I am very fond of Gentium [1]. For math, I love Euler [2], which is used in Concrete Mathematics. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentium [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMS_Euler

I like Gentium. Thanks for the tip! > Good TeX should simply yield to good typography. Making it look like tech can make it appear like you're one of the in-crowd. Although I personally try to avoid exactly that, I can see it being an advantage in -- for example -- CVs. Fwiw, my CV is also done in LaTex. I hope it doesn't show too much: http://stbr.me/cv

It's very cool! Side bars and cartoons are made with Tikz?

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#198

Post by kaeluka »

nextos wrote: post #197
kaeluka wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like Gentium. Thanks for the tip! > Good TeX should simply yield to good typography. Making it look like tech can make it appear like you're one of the in-crowd. Although I personally try to avoid exactly that, I can see it being an advantage in -- for example -- CVs. Fwiw, my CV is also done in LaTex. I hope it doesn't show too much: http://stbr.me/cv

It's very cool! Side bars and cartoons are made with Tikz?

Tikz indeed! I'd use Inkscape today though ;)

Edit: thank you! Glad you like it.

Edit 2: sources at https://github.com/kaeluka/cv

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#199

Post by teddyh »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #157
jakobegger wrote: post #20

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…

I regularly hire and contract out work based on business cards hauled from conferences, travel, et cetera . At the end of the evening I make notes on the back. (Right after meeting someone interesting, I crease a corner.)

Just out of curiosity, what do you do with a card which has one of its corners creased already?

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#200

Post by pmoriarty »

FabHK wrote: post #188
jacobolus wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> TeX is not a productive or effective tool for making business cards or other heavily graphical documents. Agreed. See the study "An Efficiency Comparison of Document Preparation Systems Used in Academic Research and Development" which concludes "LaTeX users were slower than Word users, wrote less text in the same amount of time, and produced more typesetting, orthographical, grammatical, and formatting errors. On m…

This conclusion makes me wonder if they were measuring LaTeX users while they were writing a new type of document for the first time.

My experience has been that once a given type of document has been written and tweaked to your satisfaction in LaTeX, the next time you write that type of document, you can just reuse the previous document as a template and not have to tweak much at all.

The first document does tend to require lots of tweaking, I'll grant that, especially if you're doing anything unusual that isn't covered by an existing LaTeX package.

Another thing that makes a big difference with LaTeX is the tools that are used to write it. If the "expert LaTeX" authors were writing LaTeX completely by hand, with no aid from any specialized tools, then that would explain their many mistakes. The use of advanced tools like the various LaTeX packages for vim and emacs make writing LaTeX documents a lot more streamlined and less error-prone.

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