When I started my business, I didn’t do things the way you’re “meant” to. I didn’t go out and get a nice office, or spend money on a brochure. To this day I don’t own a printer, and I send all my invoices electronically. For the first 18 months I worked on creaking hardware. My website was nothing more than a blog and I concentrated on just trying to get customers and pushing code out of the door - the shift into working for myself was big enough that it kept me busy without worrying about letterheads.

And at meetings, people politely laugh when I make a joke about “being too Web 2.0 and signed up to the digerati to bother with business cards”. Except I need business cards for all sorts of reasons these days. A year ago, I didn’t. Today, I do.

Last week a long-standing friend (and occasional colleague) launched Doddle, a printing service aimed at designers needing plain, simple, easy printing at low prices. It’s not true that I modeled for his logo - “Mr Doddle” - however I concede the resemblance is uncanny.

With a bit of prepped artwork - I needed help getting it into CMYK, because I don’t ‘do’ design packages - I went along, uploaded a zip file with the front and back graphics in there in TIFF, and filled in my billing and delivery details. It took about 5 minutes. That was Tuesday, and 10 minutes ago my new cards arrived.

I have to say I’m really pleased with the result. My cards are a little ‘unique’ in that they have a large block of text [1] on the back in quite small print, so I was worried if that would become a splodgy mess, but thanks to them being litho-printed, I’m pleased that it’s perfectly legible.

If anybody is looking for business cards, I’d challenge you to find a comparable quality at the price (especially for double-sided). I’m pleased therefore that recommendation of my friend’s business isn’t down to a form of nepotism, but because the product is actually worth the money.

[1] If you want to find out what exactly that block of text is, you’ll have to ask for a card. :-)