Business Card and Letterhead Reflection

Over the last two weeks in my PR publications class, I have been designing a business card and letterhead for an organization of my choosing. Because I am interested in working with nonprofits after graduation, I chose to create designs for the City Rescue Mission, a nonprofit located in Oklahoma City that serves the homeless and low-income communities.

While I was beginning my design for the business card, I chose to keep everything very simple. As I have previously stated, I did this because I felt like making a very flashy or complicated business card would detract from the organization’s mission. Nonprofit organizations should always keep their mission at the forefront of everything they do, so it was important for me to keep everything simple and mission-oriented. As a result, the front of the card simply features a simplified version of the organization’s mission statement and the organization’s website. The back of the card features the logo and the contact information. I chose the blue color of the card in order to complement the blue found in the logo and also because blue is a calming and hopeful color, which are both things that the organization hopes to provide to recipients of their services.

While I was designing the letterhead, I tried to incorporate into it the same ideas as I had while making my business card–a clean, simple design focused on the mission. To do this, I included the organization’s logo and mission statement. The only other design element was a single blue line running vertically down the page separating the body of the letter from the logo.

I am proud of the design for my business card. I think it makes a statement without saying much. The text on the front of the card sparks interest in the organization because it is catchy. I am also proud of the letterhead. I think the business card and the letterhead complement each other well. I liked the process of designing the letterhead more because I felt like there it was easier and that the design itself was pretty straightforward.

Overall, I am proud of the progress that I have made with using InDesign and Photoshop while undertaking this project. When I began the project, I was still fairly unfamiliar with the programs and I was still pretty uncomfortable with using it as a result. I feel like being allowed to create something of my own design from scratch helped me to become more comfortable with it because I was forced to play around with things in order to create the look that I wanted my business card and letterhead to have.

I am really thankful for the peer review element that was included after we had made a draft of our business cards because that really helped me to feel more confident in my designs. I got a lot of positive feedback from my classmates and also a lot of good ideas that I feel helped my design in the end. It was also a cool experience to get to see what everyone else had chosen and why.

To sum up my feelings about this project I would say that I am glad I had the opportunity to create something for an organization that means a lot to me and that I could see myself working (or at least interning) for. I am also glad that I was able to grow in my confidence of using the design programs and that I feel proud of my finished work.