Business Card Trend: Painterly Designs
These business cards take minimal type and embellish it with a beautiful splash of watercolour. And the look works across all sorts of industries – catering, lifestyle, hospitality and printers are just a few of the industries shown here, using the trend to give their branding an elegant yet approachable feel.
Give your own business card designs an artistic touch! Recreate the look in InDesign with simple typography and placed hand-painted images.
1. Holli Thompson
These stunning business cards designed by Viewers Like You for health guru Holli Thompson are picture-perfect. Smudgy, colourful images of fruit and vegetables by illustrator Marta Spendowska make a pretty but modern pairing with a subtle thin typeface set in a pale grey. Simply gorgeous!
Design: Viewers Like You; Client: Holli Thompson
2. Tide Retreat
A quirky dip-dye paint effect gives these cards, by Bland Designs for Tide Retreat, a dreamy quality that evokes the away-from-it-all feeling of a luxury beach holiday. Simple sans serif text and a single dividing black stroke completes the look.
Design: Bland Designs; Client: Tide Retreat
3. Sycamore Street Press
American paper printing company Sycamore Street Press produce incredibly beautiful cards, prints and gifts that they sell through their online shop. So it seems fitting that their company business cards set the standard just as high. A foiled stamp in a vintage gold is layered over a simple, organic splash of watercolour.
Tip: Create your own designs in InDesign ready for foiling by separating your foil artwork onto a different layer to the rest of the artwork.
4. The Great Catering Co.
Strategy Design & Advertising created an incredibly strong brand for New Zealand catering firm, The Great Catering Co., using simple painterly elements. Each splash of paint represents a fruit or vegetable, giving the branding a fresh and fun feel. On business cards, single images are split across several cards, giving them an extra collectable edge. Straightforward, clear text set in no-fuss black reign back a serious, corporate slant to the cards.
Tip: Try the typeface P22 Underground for a similar look on your own card designs.
Design: Strategy Design & Advertising; Client: The Great Catering Co.
5. Mylène Poisson, Sommelière
Montreal-based agency Studio Caserne collaborated to create this creative and high-impact business card design for sommelière Mylène Poisson. Dipping the bottom of a wine glass into Indian Ink, minimal cards were adorned with a rustic ‘wine’ stain. (Like wine? Take a look at our wine bottle design ideas.)
Tip: Put together a minimal business card design using InDesign, and have the cards printed before applying artwork by hand for a truly unique design.
Design: Studio Caserne; Client: Mylène Poisson
Have you experimented with the painterly trend in your own designs? Please share your results with us in the comments below.