Commission for Rachel Kibler
After I published my buggy business cards I was approached by Rachel Kibler to design some similar cards. Rachel is a software tester like myself, and she wanted some striking business cards to make an impression at her next conference.
I always begin my commissions with a face to face meeting if possible. For something as personal as business cards, it’s essential for me to know the personal identity of my client so that I can build that into my design. Rachel lives on the opposite side of the world from me but a Zoom meeting worked really well.
Rachel is a really lovely person. She struck me as both creative and intellectual, with a passion for music and mathematics. Rachel had an idea for cards involving butterflies which are a symbol of hope and growth. Butterflies are also bugs which is a nod to her software testing career. I sent Rachel some rough sketches of butterfly-themed card designs and we eventually landed on a theme that captures three key parts of her identity – technology, music and mathematics.
The clean vector design presented an opportunity to do something very striking – MOO.com offers a gold foil effect on cards which I thought would look perfect with this design. Rachel was keen so I designed the cards with the foil in mind.
I made the information side of the card in Canva and I regret it. Next time I think I’ll just use Sketch because it was a real pain to resize and modify it later.
The technology and mathematics designs were created almost entirely in Sketch using handcrafted vectors so it did take a few hours to complete. I used a few butterfly shapes from The Noun Project as masks. I also imported some free golden ratio vector templates for part of the mathematics butterfly.
![](http://designs.hogfish.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Screen-Shot-2019-07-07-at-2.19.46-PM-1024x719.png)
The music butterfly was the most difficult one because instead of creating my own vector art I used a piece of sheet music that Rachel loved. This meant extracting the elements from the sheet music in Photoshop, smoothing it all out, and integrating it into a vector image in Sketch. To make matters harder, the foil application on MOO.com didn’t handle fine lines well (thank goodness for the preview function!) so I had to expand the area filled by the musical notes otherwise they would lose their stems.
![](http://designs.hogfish.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Music-butterfly-1.png)
![](http://designs.hogfish.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/circuitboard-butterfly-1.png)
![](http://designs.hogfish.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/maths-butterfly.png)
The above images were just an example of the final design. Preparing them for print with the gold foil meant I had to produce two images per design – the base image with the colour, and the black and white image determining where the foil is applied.
![](http://designs.hogfish.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Screen-Shot-2019-07-07-at-2.30.14-PM.png)
The result was great! In Rachel’s own words:
People LOVED my business cards!!! They were very popular. 🙂
Do you love these cards too? Contact me to chat about designs for you.
![](http://designs.hogfish.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/DSC_0164-2.jpg)