Many of our partners, clients and customers have grown accustomed to our ShowNearby business cards. It is simple, plain and pretty straightforward. However, as we simultaneously ran out of business cards, we thought "Hmm...what better way to
torture challenge our designer
Derek, than to task him to design a new business card for all of us!".
So just one month after we put
Derek through that whole fiasco of designing
ShowNearby's first physical advertisement, the imperial edict of designing the business cards was delivered, received and accepted!
For the benefit of our users who may not have met with anyone from ShowNearby, here is a picture of how our old business card looked like:
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Front and Back |
So we dived into the long drawn out process of designing a new business card for all of us! The requirements were straightforward (we believe)! It had to be simple yet sophisticated, elegant and uncluttered but show a lot of information and it needed to have a unique style of ShowNearby! (Also, we wanted it within 3 days...)
So
Derek came up with a whole bunch of designs for us to choose (probably a mistake on his part....)
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Design #98101 |
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Design #98102 |
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Design #98103 |
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Based on these designs alone, we had an email thread of about 137 conversations going back and forth with some people saying "Hmm...I like Design #XXXX's, front with Design #YYYY's back, could you try it out and let me see?".
However, all the above designs did not fit the last criterion which is having a unique style to ShowNearby. And then
Derek made the biggest mistake of all...He came up with the following design...
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Design #ALL-HELL-BREAK-LOOSE |
As you can see, the major difference between this one and the previous ones was the inclusion of the mascot! That opened up a Pandora's box of requests from all over the office to have their own mascots in the namecards!
After a few more iterations, and a few more bald patches on
Derek's head (constant hair pulling), the mascots found their way to the front of the cards!
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Design #1: Bald Patch spotted |
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Design #2: Bald Patches spotted |
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Design #3: Pockets of hair remain... |
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Design #4: Minoxidil Needed! |
However dear users, as we all know, it ain't over till the fat lady sings! And since we hired no fat ladies,
Derek's nightmare is far from over! Seeing as how Shoby (the male UFO) is ShowNearby's flagship mascot, many other family members (like
Reynard as shown above) requested for it too!
Douglas then sent the following email to
Derek:
"Yes. Derek, can my shoby have a cool shade of sunglasses and maybe a tie?"
This meant one thing: Customizable mascots! Yay! And this was how it turned out...
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S'up Dude! |
The next email came from
Daniel and it went something like this:
Hi Derek, I have simple requirements...
Can Juggy be wearing a Hugo Boss suit from their fall collection of 2009. It has thick white stripes. The tie should follow exactly that of Ermenegildo Zegna's Summer collection 2010. Red tie with diagonal yellow stripes and white borders. Make sure you accentuate the texture of the tie...it has light squarish outlines on the red base. Insert a Mont Blanc Meisterstuck pen in the suit pocket as well..
Oh a top hat plus a Blackberry Torch half opened showing up till the second row of keys of the hard keyboard goes well with the image of an executive too!
At this point,
Derek photoshop-ed an old photo of us and sent it to everyone with "subtle" hints that we should probably stop making changes...
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From Left to Right: Daniel, CJ and PK (Smile Guys!) |
So lastly we decided that we shall just go with whatever he has done so far and just live with it. Of course, a longtime later (about 2 days to be exact), we felt
Derek would probably be feeling a little better! So we decided to test the waters a little bit more and tasked him to do one final thing!
Create a facebook version for all of us!!!! And here it is, check out our
facebook version of the business cards! It includes a one-liner from everyone too! :)
Cheers!
PS: We really appreciate all the effort you put in entertaining requests from all of us
Derek! Wonderful job you've done for us! For that, you earned yourself free flow of dark cherry frappucino on the company!
PPS: Free flow as long as it does not exceed the volume of a Grande Starbucks cup! ;)