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Designing a Business Card in LaTeX
- Jonovono 10y agoNice! I recently re-did my business cards. Pretty happy with how they came out: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C25LX0bXAAAWWYL.jpg:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C25LX0bXAAAWWYL.jpg:large
- vvpan 10y agoThat domain name is pretty bold! I am very much amused.
- gravypod 10y agoWhere do I order cards like these?
- tedmiston 10y agoReally nice how you pulled off name + email + website in one line.
- davnn 10y agoAwesome, I much prefer a creative idea than knowing the tool used for creation.
- saalaa 10y agoHey, what font did you use? One notable feature is that the @ is very circular which is quite rare with fixed fonts.
- Jonovono 10y agoIt's called Cutive Mono! Took awhile to settle on one :p
- TwoBit 10y agoSerious question: Is LaTeX used outside academia these days?
- oever 10y ago"Mastering MuseScore" was written in LaTeX. The presentation and content are excellent. https://musescore.org/en/node/64711 https://musescore.org/en/node/64711
- Avshalom 10y agoHell I think it's just barely hanging on in acedamia
- Cyph0n 10y agoThat's definitely not the case in computer science and electrical engineering at least. LaTeX definitely isn't great, but I don't see a viable alternative.
- privong 10y ago> That's definitely not the case in computer science and electrical engineering at least. Same for astronomy/astrophysics. Most of the publications are typeset in LaTeX.
- opieters 10y agoIndeed, lots of people I know (mainly computer science, electrical engineering and physics) still heavily rely on it for long documents and papers.
- DonaldFisk 10y agoIn the 1990s I used FrameMaker. It's still around, now owned by Adobe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_FrameMaker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_FrameMaker
- washadjeffmad 10y agoThere's always InDesign, but given its time to proficiency, I think the bast case for similar purposes might still be something creating LaTeX/DocBooks source that ports well to InDesign.
- jakobegger 10y agoThese 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 I still have a bunch of them in my desk drawer, they're very outdated, and I only use them for grocery lists.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 general?
- Frondo 10y agoI think the answer is, it depends. In the circles where I vend stuff, if you don't have one, people look at you as a grade-A idiot. Like you showed up to a meeting without pants/a skirt on. Heck, even when I go to startup meetups, everyone asks for a card (medium-sized Pacific Northwest city). If they're going out of style, they're still fashionable here.
- jrickert 10y agoI hand them out frequently. Sometimes to people I already know who want my contact information. It's easier to hand someone a card versus disrupting an interesting conversation to exchange details.
- BucketSort 10y agoWe got our first big break 4 months ago by giving out a business card. You have to make a connection first before you slip the card. I think your experience is more a reflection of your selling skills than anything.
- chrisseaton 10y agoDon'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.
- Tharkun 10y agoIndeed. Remember: accept them with both hands and briefly inspect them. It's the polite thing to do.
- DonaldFisk 10y agoI made mine using LaTeX for VL/HCC 2016. It's on http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/blog/VLHCC2016.html http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/blog/VLHCC2016.html I repeated enough times to fill a page, printed it, and cut the cards.
- seanmcdirmid 10y agoNice environment! But...why do justified on a webpage?
- DonaldFisk 10y agoThanks. 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.
- seanmcdirmid 10y agoSo since this about latex it feels appropriate to point this out. Justified works well when you have auto word hyphenation turned on, and your layouts are fixed. Web doesn't do word hyphenation (I think?), so the words have odd spacing between them, it sort of stands out right away. Justification works in latex because of word breaking, but even then one has to manually fix underfilled or overfilled lines (I.e. by slightly changing word usage). For web content where you have less control over these things (as opposed to printing for a fixed layout via PDF), ragged right often works better.
- DonaldFisk 10y agoSo when there are large gaps between the words on a line, I should experiment with manual hyphenation until it looks better?
- evincarofautumn 10y agoCSS3 has automatic hyphenation (hyphens: auto) which you can tweak with manual soft-hyphens (­), and there are client-side hyphenators (Hyphenator.js, Hypher) available as fallbacks.
- jilljennV 10y agoIn March 2014, I attended a conference in Atlanta. In the subway, some nice guy told me I had to make business cards for the conference. So I went to some kinko and asked: - How much for 250 business cards? - $69. - If I provide a PDF and just ask you to print and cut, can you do it for today? - Yes. - How much? - $39. Do you have the file? - Yes. It was a lie. I opened a new LaTeX document and typed this thing, thanks to Stack Overflow. https://github.com/jilljenn/business-card https://github.com/jilljenn/business-card
- gruez 10y ago>some nice guy told me I had to make business cards for the conference why? are they checking for business cards at the entrance or something?
- chrisseaton 10y agoI don't understand. What was the lie?
- aseipp 10y agoI believe he means when he responded "Yes" to the final question (as in "Yes, I have the PDF file for the business card"), he was lying and had nothing. So he quickly searched SO and found what he needed. Sometimes, that's just what Stack Overflow is there for: a quickly accessible CYA!
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- NelsonMinar 10y agoIf 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.)
- opieters 10y agoI 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 available online).
- bhickey 10y agoI edit a genre fiction and we do all our layout in XeTeX. I picked it because it's the right tool for the job, and I don't know PageMaker. The colophon calls attention to it because I think it's helpful to tell others how you made something (typefaces, tools, etc.) rather than for nerd cred. https://www.aliterate.org/aliterate-page47.pdf https://www.aliterate.org/aliterate-page47.pdf The typefaces are Minion and Myriad.
- eriknstr 10y agoWhen I copy text from your PDF it comes out all garbled. Does this happen to others as well? Is it intentional; some form of copy protection?
- bhickey 10y agoHuh, totally weird. Maybe it's an encoding issue? The character appear to be getting shifted by -39 (ex. c 143 ->D 104) I never noticed because I'm typesetting for print.
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- usaphp 10y agoHas 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.
- joemi 10y agoAs an iOS user, I always assumed QR code reading was just built into Android's camera app. Is that not so?
- Normal_gaussian 10y agoKind of. Google Now has QR code reading built in, if you have a QR code on the screen (e.g through a camera app) you can have google now scan the screen by holding the home button. I don't remember having to enable it, but if it isn't enabled for android users you can go into Google Now settings and enable "Screen Search".
- mastax 10y ago(from memory, may be out of date) The AOSP camera app does not support QR code reading, and neither does Google's camera app. Many Android phones will have one or both of these installed. Most phones also come with a manufacturer-specific camera app. I know new-ish Motorola phones will read QR codes, and I suspect that the "kitchen sink" vendors like Samsung would as well.
- Normal_gaussian 10y agoIt is kind of indirect, Google Now Screen Search supports QR Codes, so if you have a way to get the code onto your screen (via the camera app viewfinder for example) you can read it.
- hadrien01 10y agoIt's built in Windows Phone's camera app, but in Android phones I've tested, there's no QR code recognition.
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- guitarbill 10y agoI think it might have been easier starting with the `standalone` document class vs `article`, then you don't have to spend so much time on set-up. You just have to make sure the tikz pictures are the right size, and standalone will put each picture on a new page.
- gellman 10y agoI would love to use this to design my lab badges as well :)
- jilljennV 10y agoWhat about http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/67746/combining-paths-before-making-them-double/68415 http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/67746/combining-paths...?
- slbenfica 10y agoI bet Knuth wouldn't be happy to hear that LaTeX was used to design Business Cards
- graycat 10y agoFirst, Knuth did TeX, Plain TeX, and was not the primary force behind LaTeX. Second, IIRC, Knuth did proudly use TeX to print dinner menu, invitations, or some such.
- adtac 10y ago>Knuth did proudly use TeX to print dinner menu That's hilarious. Any sources on that? That man is incredible.
- graycat 10y agoI was typing quickly from memory. With The TeXBook, on page 411 he has a concert program; on page 248 he has a genealogy chart; on page 247 he has some nicely formatted stock tables; on pages 233, 236-7 he has some recipe stuff from Julia Child. So, instead of a menu, I found a concert program and some recipes. Maybe there is a menu in there someplace. He also has an addressed envelope where he used his Metafont in some tricky way to get something like a stamp. He might also be able to get from TeX with Metafont the whatever they are called little boxes of geometric gibberish used as identifiers. I did some TeX macros for foils -- I get a nice box around each foil. Some more macros I did let me do a simple drawing in, say, old Microsoft Photodraw, include it in a picture in a TeX document, and then position TeX math as annotation overlays on the drawing. So, I can, say, draw a right triangle and put the standard Pythagorean theorem annotation on the figure. Can put darned nearly any TeX expression as annotation. TeX is nice and for math nearly essential.
- throwayguestman 10y ago>little boxes of geometric gibberish used as identifiers in which context?
- slbenfica 10y agoOut of curiosity, what was the most beautiful thing you've seen designed/made in LaTeX?
- biofox 10y agohttp://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1319/showcase-of-beautiful-typography-done-in-tex-friends http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1319/showcase-of-beau...
- amelius 10y agoYou don't need an advanced text formatting system to design a business card. Any system that allows you to place short strings of text at any desired (x,y) position will do just fine. In fact, such a simple system might be better at not getting in your way.
- NegativeK 10y agoThe author addresses this in the second paragraph. > I picked LaTeX because I want to have a platform independent implementation and because why not? I really like making LaTeX documents, so this seemed like something other than creating long documents.
- tedmiston 10y agoI've done my resume in CSS for a decade now (with print media styles to generate a PDF) for this reason. I don't currently use business cards but if that changed would probably do the same.
- rangibaby 10y agoLooks nice but: Hex colors don't map to CMYK at all. Your printer may be able to use a non-CMYK color using a special ink but that may cost more. There are no crop marks or bleed. You'll want to add them.
- sokoloff 10y agoThose 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_guide.pdf 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 tolerances in cutting). The human eye can readily see the difference in thickness of the white border. A far more tolerant design would take the green fill all the way to the edge. It's not the end of the world to have the backside of your business card have slightly uneven margins, but if you're equally happy with a full fill (and you bleed it beyond the cut lines), you'll never end up with a visibly bad cut.
- rangibaby 10y agoWow! 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!
- sokoloff 10y agoNP. 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. ;)
- ptrptr 10y agoLet's put it that way - Patrick Bateman would not be impressed by this design, otherwise commandable effort!
- graycat 10y agoI've done all my business cards in TeX, just Plain TeX, not LaTeX, for years. It's just a simple TeX exercise. I have the spacing so that the printing goes to some standard card stock for business cards with the positioning just right. Then bending the printed card stock results in a stack of business cards. Works great. Simple.
- drivingmenuts 10y agoSo your business cards have fuzzy edges from the perforations? That just screams amateur.
- nnd 10y agoPeople still use business cards?
- candeira 10y agoVertical 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.
- user5994461 10y agoBusiness Tip: ALWAYS use a white background on a business card (or at least, leave one side empty full white). People will write and take notes on the card. Can't take note on a dark background.
- deerpig 10y agoI completely agree and would add that your name, telephone number and email address should be a large enough font that people don't have to take out their reading glasses or squint to read it.
- FlorianRappl 10y agoCan't agree more! I see a lot of bad business cards which do not leave one side empty full white.
- forrestthewoods 10y agoI have an iPhone. How do I scan a QR code? There's not a built in reader that I know of?
- rongway 10y agoChallenge - do the card in Asymptote
- bcarlton0 10y agoMine is a PCB (Printed Circuit Board). I designed it with KiCAD. Open source CC-BY-NC-SA.https://github.com/bdc0/businesscard https://github.com/bdc0/businesscard
- err4nt 10y agoI 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!
- bcarlton0 10y agoYou aren't the only one who likes it; it definitely gets noticed. They cost ~$1 (US) in quantity. The most common question I get is "If I install the chips, what do I get?" Unfortunately, the answer is nothing. There are people who have done that.
- janci 10y agoWhat an horrific idea to make an accidental horizontal swipe on a mobile device make the page jump to the top!
- countryqt30 10y agoI don't understand what the random icons at the bottom of the card mean. Do you want to show that you're cool? :D
- letientai299 10y agoOff topic. Recently I have rebuilt my CV in LaTeX and I want to share it with you here: https://github.com/letientai299/cv https://github.com/letientai299/cv
- pmoriarty 10y agoMy favorite business card belongs to Kevin Mitnick.[1] Can LaTeX do that? [1] - http://i.imgur.com/NxCZ32J.jpg http://i.imgur.com/NxCZ32J.jpg
- klaudioz 10y agoI have a problem trying to generate the document with: xelatex src/front.tex It is generated but without icons. If I see the file front.log I think it's trying to write the icons using Fira Sans: Missing character: There is no in font Fira Sans/OT:script=latn;language=DFLT;mapping=tex-text;! (The line shows 9 times and there are 9 icons too) I tried everything but I have never used before Latex, so it's really complicated. Any comment will be very welcome. Thanks.
- apricot 10y agoOnce I wrote a ten-line TeX program to add serial numbers to a large stack of Scantron forms. It worked well enough, but that's when I learned that laser printers are much less precise than I thought when it comes to positioning relative to the edges of the paper.