Long Distance Design

I recently designed business cards for Valia Carvalho, an Arts & Culture Manager based in Berlin. Valia and I worked over the internet (her in Berlin, me in Valparaíso, Chile), and the cards were gang-printed in Germany. Finished with a high gloss flood varnish, the colours are ultra-vibrant and the card has a slick polished feel. The card back is saturated with colour and pattern, contrasted by a spacious treatment of the typography on the front side. The card tells a little story about the flip-sides of expression and complexity, and clarity and organization.

The design represents both the new-media and fine art components of the projects that Valia manages, many of which are facilitated by the internet. The pixel pattern is generated from a photo I took of a luscious red lily I found in the Colombian hinterland, and the hand drawn lines are just that, rendered with charcoal and then scanned and colourized in Photoshop. Combined, the grid and random lines riff off of each other, and in places there is a merging of colours.

The design took about two-weeks to complete, allowing plenty of time between revisions to reflect and discuss ideas. Designs and feedback were sent back and forth by email, chat, or by skype calls, and final files were sent directly to the printer in Germany.

I’ve included a few of the card designs below to show the evolution of the design and some of the early solutions that I presented to Valia.

These two cards were too much about the personalized expressive marks and unconventional colour combinations, and didn’t convey ”management” strongly enough.

These modernized “calling cards”, in a neat 2" x 2" size, were an early attempt at combining a digital-esque pattern with a hand-drawn graphic.

The first incarnation of the winning design. We decided the proportions of the grid pattern were too oversized and quilt-like, and should be derived by pixelating an image for authenticity. Once the final pattern was created, I found it much more interesting to break the hand-drawn lines from their woven arrangement, and combine them with the pixel pattern.