Business cards

We had our first proper deadline this week. On Tuesday, my colleague attended a networking meeting at 7am. We were introduced the business breakfast club by our soon-to-be accountant who took my colleague along as his guest. My business partner spoke about our business intentions for a couple of minutes to a room of 30. At these networking meetings it is standard practice for each person to take a business card from each other person. We didn't have any business cards printed up until 5pm the day before.

Over the previous weekend our luck was in and we finalised the logo and layout of our business cards with our graphic designer, who is usually based in London, but happened to head north for the weekend to see friends. We collared her for a few hours on saturday and hammered out the design between ourselves. Because we wanted a specific colour printed on the business cards, we were advised to use a printer that allowed us to pick a pantone colour and thus used a lithographic printing press.

No printers were open on the weekend so I waited for Monday. I went to the two local printers and only one could do the Pantone printing, and the shop assistant told me about the service and that it would take 3 days to finish the job. It seems that lithographic printing is not a simple process. It involves printing using a press, which needs to be set up, plus the ink needs to be sourced and set up.

I got a quote anyway and returned home and rung around a number of other printers to get quotes and timescales. The best quote was around £30 cheaper and could be done in a much quicker timescale, but not quick enough. In the end, I opted for a short-term solution of digital printing 50 business cards. The quality is not as good and the colour was not exact, but it sufficed for the early morning meeting.

We're gathering all the documents that we wish to print so that we can print everything at once. Apparently it is cheaper if we are using the same colour ink, as part of the charge is due to setting up the printing press and installing the ink.