I did a card for myself that just had my email address as you’ve described above. I think it is fun and clever, but traditional suits might think it a little too much. I guess I can see both sides. Have you shown your boss what you are thinking?

Sorry to be old fashioned but I think a phone number is pretty important too...

Why not provide everyone with two sets of cards, one with email only and one with the traditional info. If you’re clever you might be able to achieve this result by dropping one of the colors (passes through the press?) on the e-mail only card.

It’s a gorgeous design, but I do think that the retro design might work better if you kept it traditional and put a name line on the card. But a phone number is really a must on a business card (unless people at the company just don’t have phones)—if you leave the phone number off for the sake of the design, the design has broken the function of the piece, and thus it is a bad design.

How big is the company? If it’s large, then i wouldn’t count on the email addresses. There’s always more than one John Smith and Sara Jones that mess up the email system.

I’d agree with Mr. Aluminum. It looks great for a small designer or firm, but large companies have issues. We had a standard of first initial & last name at my last job. Worked fine until we had an asian last name of Ong, first name with a “B”... bong@thecomapny.com just didn’t fit.

It sounds like an idea to use on a freelance job. Then your design-challenged, corporate-man boss has no say as to how creative you want to be.

Business cards are something that people with a job can feel proud of. If my name isn’t REALLY on it, it just adds to the feeling of being another number. Having your personal identity represented by an e-mail sounds insulting to the individual. Plus, what’s your point? What are you trying to say? Is it a meaningful design decision? Are you trying to save ink? It’s not a “good fight” if it’s a pointless design whim.

Am I pushing foward our medium or am I going against graphic design dogma?

Rereading this, I really don’t think it’s a graphic design issue at all. That’s not the way to think about it. It’s really more of a branding issue - and the card’s functionality. You can make it look great either way. I think you’re wasting your time if you try to convince your boss on terms of design. And you run the risk of making him think designers don’t know what they’re talking about, which could come to bite you in the ass down the road.

I think the concept is good. Nice simple clean design. But you kinda gotta think of the purpose of a business card & the market your targeting. It’s a contact card that represents a business as well as an individual. A phone number is still an essential element in contact information. Even though it seems highly unlikely there are still many people to this day who do not have a computer nor the internet. Another suggestion when presenting a concept to your boss you may want to present more than one idea because although your the designer they are the boss and it will always be that way! If he has design skills or not. He has a vision of what he wants. So try giving him more then one option to choose from. It always seemed to work for me with my boss. Hopefully I gave you some useful information!

Thanks for all the imput guys— but this isn’t my card. I was just asking about combinding the name/email into one line and provided that card above as an example incase my description wasn’t clear.

My card still has office, cell, and fax numbers as well as our address and website. Sorry for the confusion!

My original question was pertaining to if everyone thought the combination of name/email was an okay thing to do or if it was against graphic design dogma— like trying to pass off Optimum as Optima.

Further info: We are a medium sized (1000+ employee)document management/business process company who is rebranding themselves as “Powered by technology. Perfected by people.” We switched to Helvetica for our logo, a logo mark that is abstract people, and am trying to brand outselves as people serving people, customer oriented. So I thought with the combination of the name/email was a young, different, “breaks from the traditional”, typographic way to relay our new image.

Thoughts?

I reiterate that I don’t think it’s a question of “graphic design dogma”, and I’m not sure why you’re going at it that way. It’s a content/branding issue and waving the graphic design stick at your boss seems misdirected. If you want to convince him to keep it that simple, you should be talking about the image of the company, not graphic design. As a designer your job is to come up with an innovative solution either way.

How about something like:

bob.jones
@
example.com

Reading this one way you get “Bob Jones at Example.com” — the name and company — and the other way you get an email address.