What business card design would best suit a photographer?

A quick search on the internet for ‘creative business cards’ would yield the following interesting cards: A ’Cheese grater’ card for the cheese shop owner, cute rollable ‘Yoga mat’ cards for the fitness instructor, or custom designed ‘miniature plumbers’ for the plumber.

For photographers’ business cards, not many ideas out there captured the elegance in design or made that bold statement that I wanted. This bothered me for awhile, until I found my eureka moment one day.

Toying around with my wallet on a random evening, I pulled out an Instax / polaroid print. It was a photo of my friend and I over a year ago at a school function.

“Hey… this polaroid fits in my wallet!” I was excited.

You might think, duh, you just realised that? However it was this moment of epiphany: The object I held in my hands was an iconic symbol of the professional trade.

With the Instax SHARE SP-2 printing machine (which I borrowed from a friend), I was able to customise a design and print my details on Instaxes.

Pantone colours of the year ‘Greenery’ (2016) and ‘Marsala’ (2014) formed the background colours. These were for distribution to wedding vendors and clients. Also, I did a limited run of white ones, reserved for special friends who’ve been with me ever since I started the profession.

All design was done using Pages, and didn’t require fancy designing applications. I exported the design into a JPEG and sent it from my iPhone to the printer. The printer churned out a print every 10 seconds, so it took me roughly half an hour to finish my initial batch.

I repurposed the nifty empty instax cartridge to be my name card dispenser too!

Make a unique business card? Not that hard after all.
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I’m Klaus Tan, Singapore’s youngest wedding photographer, running under the label chuttersnap!

Check out more pictures of the cards here.