Green Business Cards!

Tango, anyone?

Well hello there, chickadees.  I hope you’re not offended by that greeting; it’s just that I once had a social studies teacher who would greet us as her “little chickadees,” and I thought about her today.   Not enough to remember her name, of course _ in fact, I don’t remember anything else about this woman, or her social studies class, save for the time she told us to go home and write a book report about a state and then decided not to cudgel the child who came back with ribbons of sentences about that 51st state we’re all so familiar with while teetering into adolescence: confusion.

Confusion, in fact, gripped me the other day as I contemplated making business cards.  The Big Corporate Behemoth under whose employ I once toiled used to take care of that whole networking/printing shazam.  But this week, after RSVPing to an alumni function, I was seized by the fact that, yes, Virginia, (a more mundane state) I needed business cards.

Except.  I’m someone who turns apple cores into tea (and vinegar _ upcoming post!) and who makes her own shampoo and deodorant (again, more later) to help both my wallet and the environment, so business cards presented a conundrum: they’re bad for the planet, even if the recipient ends up recycling them.  In fact, the recipient often fails to even give your card a second glance, especially after initial contact has been established.   Ideally, business cards would go the way of the dodo bird, although since we’re talking about the planet here, perhaps that’s too morose an allusion.  They should go the way of the unicycle _ an inefficient, quirky oddity thankfully usurped by a more efficient and streamlined method of transport.  In this case, virtual business cards transport one’s contact information quite nicely.  Except that people need to remember your URL or email address or your, um, name to access said info.  And people, especially the poorly fed and expansive and well-lubricated people one meets at alumni parties or at conventions, often display a mighty aversion to remembering names of any sort.

Therefore, unless your URL is hello dot com or your email address WorshipMeBitch@God dot com, you need a physical card.

To acquire mine, I could have walked down the street to Kinkos, or I could have ordered them online.  In fact, there are indeed companies who print cards on recycled paper using soy-based ink.  But then they’d be using large amounts of fossil fuels to transport the cards, and that, like the dodo bird, just didn’t fly.  

Hmmm…what to do.  Incidentally, as a kid, I used to interchange the words “confusion” and “Confucious.”  So I googled, “Confucious say Earth,” and acquired, in a sluggish .40 seconds:

“Confucius say virginity like bubble _ one prick, all gone.”

Well, friends, I’ve graduated from green business card virginity.  I decided to get over my aversion to craftiness and located some maps I’d saved from a trip to Buenos Aires a few years back.  I then found some old watercolor “paintings” begging to be shorn and repurposed.  The hefty mail pile on my desk contributed images and blank pages torn from Christmas and other greeting cards.  (Usually, people write the notes on the page opposite the one behind the image.)  I burrowed through my art box and discovered interesting stamps, stickers, Sierra Club cards, mailing address labels from charities panting for donations, beautiful images I’d ripped from magazines, even scraps of fabric.  I found reams of watercolor paper (that I’d clearly never paint on again) thin enough to feed through my inkjet printer but thick enough to withstand some manhandling.  Or womanhandling.  That paper, I decided, would be my card stock, although you could probably use brown paper bags that you reinforce, or old greeting cards or even recycled card stock.

Yes, those are astronauts. I'm a geek. And that lamp will be featured in an upcoming post.

I then found this nifty free software, a design program which played nicely with my Mac.  A few minutes after downloading the program, I chose a template, filled in the info, played with the graphics and printed.  Add in a dash of glue stick, a slice of Argentina and a bit of moxie and, woo!  (fairly) sustainable, eco-friendly business cards.

Of course, if you’re going to be printing out hundreds of these things, the crafty factor might get a bit old, the endeavor a bit expensive, and the mood a bit cranky.  That crankiness occurred in my person once or twice yesterday, and I only made 30 cards.  (Again: I am not an inherently crafty person.)  If I were to make more cards, I’d likely design and order a rubber stamp with my info on it, and then thwack the hell out of any blank scrap of paper lying around.  I might also consider ordering from a company that specializes in green printing, but I’m trying to make only as many as I need.  Employers I’ve worked for in the past print hundreds of cards at a time, and when you have that many, you hand them out to people just to get rid of them, and then those people throw the cards away just to get rid of them.  By printing fewer, and personalizing them, I can be more judicious, thus entering a state my teacher might’ve approved of: equilibrium.