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Business Card Ideas

The Simplest Business Card Ideas Are Always The Best

Innovative business card ideas are often misunderstood. The key message intended for prospective customers becomes lost in radical attempts at originality. These attempts at originality can in fact have a negative effect on prospective customers, invoking a deeper discussion about the actual design and presentation of your business card, rather than how your business can actually help others succeed. The last thing you want to encourage when handing out your business card are more questions about what your business does, or why you chose such an idea for your business card in the first place. Many design and communication firms will attempt to awe and inspire others with radical and non traditional business card designs. Ironically, these companies exist to help you better communicate a clear message.

To develop your business card ideas, start by creating a simple business tag line. Grab a piece of paper and pen and start to develop a tag line that either captures the essence of your business, or at the very least, is a broad statement of your business vision, your goal, or something which convinces people that you are a leader in your industry. Sometimes called a “motto”, or in more professional circles, a “competency statement”, your tag line should be short, to the point, sometimes catchy, but always memorable. As an example, this tag line, belonging to an enormously successful Canadian mattress manufacturer, “Why Buy a Mattress Anywhere Else”, is clear and to the point and the tag line is an integral part of their larger marketing campaign, used across mediums including print, television, radio and the Internet. Other tag lines are more abstract, but memorable, such as the McDonald’s campaign, “I’m Loving It!”. A tag line can be simple, as long as it can be used to help build trust in the customer. For example, Jim Smith, Certified Programmer, or, Eric Gibson, Professional Photographer. There is no rule for the tag line, just keep it tasteful, positive, clear, and to the point.

Photo business card images are gaining momentum among business card designs, because people have a tendency to remember visuals over text. For example, if you are a wedding planner, even subtle, full color imagery can be effective to communicate a message without words and can create a lasting first impression. You may utilize a background image of a couple in love at the alter, a detailed and elaborate wedding hall, or a bride in reflection decked in her bridal gown. The right image selection can visually communicate your industry or area of expertise, and then encourage the card holder to read the details.

Professor Print’s free online business card maker can help you develop your business card ideas and experiment with language and presentation using point and click web-based tools. Before you commit to going to print, you can forward your ideas to friends and colleagues in order to solicit their feedback and ensure your business card is one that will not be thrown away.

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Retouching people - by: rami b.a. lady-beetle

No, we are not going to touch anybody, no one will be physically harmed. We are just discussing retouching people’s photos in Photoshop. This one of the most commonly used actions, when people’s photos are incorporated into a graphic design.

In many cases the photos are taken with a home camera, or a digital camera with a low optical quality or low resolution, and people just don’t look as pretty as they should. In this tutorial we will go over one of the techniques for general retouching and improving the overall look. This is a simple, quick, and easy technique, to comprehend and to use.

abstract:
There are many techniques for processing and retouching photos in general and people’s photos in particular. You can reach high levels of picture processing and bring the models to a very high level, even if they are not that beautiful in real life, or that the photo itself is problematic. In this tutorial we will use a very simple technique for retouching portraits. of course you can use this method for different kinds of photos and receive interesting effects.

creating the new file:
we shall begin by opening the picture file, and for your results to come out similar to the ones on this tutorial, you should use the same definitions as we did.

file name: retouching
file size: 400 x 400 pixels
resolution: 300 dpi

lets first look at the original photo.

and now the final result…

We can continue and improve the photo even further, by additional proceesing actions, but in this tutorial we will limit ourselves to the simple technique and let go of the professional methods.

So how was it done?…
For the sake of order we will name this picture layer MyImage.
Now we will duplicate the MyImage layer by selecting the layer and activating the command:

Layer -> Duplicate Layer

Confused? To this new layer we will call ImageEffect and we will define it’s blending mode as Screen.

Good. Now that the new layer ImageEffect is selected, we will activate a blur filter on the layer.

Filter -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur

The filter’s dialog box will appear, where we will choose a radius of 5 pixels (expanding or reducing the radius will affect the blur intensity).

and there… we’re done…

Of course you can go on and proscess the photo in various differnt techniques. here’s the final result again:

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