Themed Business Cards vs Regular

​The cosplay community is a fast moving, interactive world, and if you're trying to market yourself, business cards - as with any field - are always handy. This blog post explores the variety of business cards I've designed and developed for different occasions and the benefits of using many vs one.

​First, let's talk about the basics of a business card. It's a mini showcase of your work, with various ways of communication. For cosplayers this usually entails your best cosplay(s) and your social links. You can get it one sided, or two sided, rounded corners, textured, etc. Once you get the basics out of the way, your design is fairly limitless.

As you can see, I had a basic design with a costume and it was laid out neatly with my info. Vistaprint has some amazing offers where you can usually get 500 cards starting at only 10 bucks. This is an amazing deal. You cannot get much cheaper than that.

But our costumes are ever growing and changing. I constantly ask myself;

"Am I going to be happy handing out this old, out dated representation of myself in a year? Or more? How long will it take me to hand out 500 business cards?"

Plus there's the possibility of brand changes, new websites, or you find you use a new social site more than others. These are all things that change over time as you advance throughout your cosplay journey.

​My solution for this was to print in smaller batches, and to use different cards for different things. I print my cards on 8.5"x11" cardstock from Staples. I cut out the cards by hand - come on, I'm a cosplayer, I trust my precision.

I can fit 10 cards on one page so that allows for a really exclusive amount of prints if I want. I only print one side since I'm not too picky and a wider range of single sided cards works better for me vs splurging for double sided cards.

Cost wise, it is a bit more expensive. I printed 30 cards for $4, but to have the ability to modify and create all these different cards is exciting, and honestly the cost is so spaced it out its barely noticeable.

Most recently, I designed "selfie cards" for handing out at conventions. I give them to photographers who ask for photos and when they're sorting through thousands of photos, they can easily tell who I was cosplaying as, and can even credit the character and series since I wrote it on the card. And then I link all my social sites and any other links they might be interested in.

​These also worked really well as exclusive collector cards and fans were finding me to collect new ones each day. They were technically the first prints created of my new costumes, which made them extremely limited and unique.

Another card I like to print is for when I send out prints, patreon packages, or anything else like giveaway winners, or random letters to friends. It simply says thanks for your support and directs them back to my sites.

​Depending on your online store or other social sites, you can even include coupon codes or other unique exclusives to say thanks to your followers. It's always nice to add a business card depending how this person found you and what you're sending them so they can see the full range of your social sites and content.

There's many other types of cards and themes you can come up with to suit your personal brand, and you have so much more creative freedom this way. What kind of cards do you plan to develop? share them in the comments!