Premise: I have noticed over the past few years that fewer and fewer people are carrying business cards around. I also noticed that as a mechanism to control costs, many companies are no longer printing business cards for employees – most recently when I wondered what it would take to get cards to represent myself and my employer at an industry conference (in short – not fucking likely). But in most professional social situtations, there is still some expectation of the exchange, and people do feel sheepish when they don’t have them. So I started to wonder: what is the value of business cards in social interaction design? This post is not an academic discourse – just some thoughts I had while designing my own cards. I want to understand the nature, value and meaning of a branded business card in our hyperreality where most have multiplicities of identity manifest on social networks.
Branding, Semiotics, Objects
One problem for a designer is the nature of design itself. To design is to “show thy own true self” – to explore and then make manifest myself in some way that which an audience can then view and judge to solve a particular problem. First, many designers are too busy solving problems for their customers. Another is to design their own brand is to be left open to judgement. Is this not the reason most designers have such a poor website? Piece of shit business card? Does the cobbler’s children really have no shoes, or is the cobbler a charlatan.
I am reminded of an old friend Todd Zaki Warfel, having this discussion some years ago. Some choose not to engage in this discussion, but others, when forced, simply say – here we are – here is our work, here is how we did it, and this is it – please judge me. This is how Todd and I have always felt. We prefer to do things from scratch. It may be tough, it may suck – but we’ll do this from scratch and we’ll share it all – It’s an honest approach harking back to the Scottish Empiricists of the 17th century.
I want to discuss this, as well as the meaning of business cards, but first, to lay bare what I am talking about, I took as a case study my own recent experience designing my personal business cards. Here they are so that I don’t build them up too much before we discuss the philosophy or semiotics of them too soon,
Business card technical details:
Size: 3 x 2.25
Paper: 260# Pegasus Duplex Cover, Midnight Black Vellum
Side A: Foil Stamp Black + Foil Stamp white
Side B: Foil Stamp Black
Finishing: Duplex + Cut
The cards are custom mounted stock which means that it technically doesn’t exist. It’s 2 pieces of paper which is letterpress printed on the outer 2 layers and then glued together. They are then die cut to the right dimension and inserted into the custom folder that was designed for them.
Sleeve technical details:
Size: 3.625 x 5.5 folding to 3.125″ x 2.375″
Paper: 80# Pegasus Cover, Midnight Black Vellum
Side A: Foil Stamp Black
Finishing: Make Die + Diecut + Fold + Glue
I think that “Brand” is a complex media object, its very definition is a contested metapragmatic domain between interested popular discourses and varied professional discourses of designers, lawyers, marketers, consumers and activists. Furthermore, as a privileged semiotic object, the semiotic categories of brand are frequently extended not only to a whole new range of services, quasi-commodities and objects that are not in themselves economic objects (including experiences, places, countries, even recent discussions of ‘anthropology’ itself as a brand), so that the semiotic language of brand has undergone a curious form of genericide in which brand is often coextensive with semiosis as such. As a result of these tendencies, brands are typically represented as being in their very essence a kind of deterritorialized, immaterial form of mediation, a kind of globalized intertextuality, a semiotic image of the global capitalist economy itself , very far from the materiality of messages on bottles in which they are often encountered on a token level.
Discussions of a category of ‘brand’ or ‘branding’ in anthropology inherit many of the tendencies of popular and professional discourses on the subject. In anthropology, for example, following much popular discourse, discussion of brand is almost always made identical with the discussion of the culture of circulation that brands indirectly index, hence, brand is almost synonymous with globalization, and therefore, most attention is given to specific highly salient brands engaged in cultural hegemony – killing off indigenous objects, media, and signifiers of consumption in favor of those imposed through free-trade deals and western military power. I care less about brand as global imperialist imperative and more of brand as inter-subjective co-created cultural fetish-object.
Do these cards themselves stack up, so to speak, according to that? How are they a media-fetish object? An interesting note on object fetishism comes from a friend, Thomas Wendt, writing in an article “Inspiration Fetishism,”
“Fetishism” is a Portuguese, Latin, and Spanish hybrid related to art, the act of making something, sorcery, and artificiality. It has only recently become related to sexual objects and things that are thought to hold a power for which there is no basis. That power, for example, can be religious (a crucifix), sexual (leather), or otherwise. For Karl Marx, commodities are the universal fetish; for Sigmund Freud, they represent adisplacement of libido. Either way, it relates to a perceived necessity without which one cannot perform a certain function.
In some cases, particularly recent discussions of virtual environments, it can much more directly be argued that the line between producer and consumer is truly blurred (Coombe et al.) such that brand as fetish-object is co-created between designer and consumer and that which is signified by the card itself – even if it person, becomes commodified, at least if what Marx says holds true. To borrow from Jerry McGuire – you no longer complete me – you commodify me.
Importantly however, the intertexts of brand that occur as it is appropriated and redeployed by consumers, sometimes helping define the brand or lending it their own labor of consumption, is not legally recognized in property law and is subject to unilateral restriction. This area of brand has become a dominant theme in recent literature, linked to often uncritical appropriation of the professional discourses, definitions and claims of marketing professionals into anthropological discussions, a reflexive move aided by the frequently porous professional boundaries between the two discourses (Callon et al. 2000). Here, again, just as producer or designer is treated as a Goffmanian ‘figure’, so too the consumer. Here, as well, we can see shifts from the interpellation of the consumer qua consumer to interpellation of the consumer as citizen, among other modalities, thus conflating different social imaginaries (for example Berdahl 1999, Bach 2002, Jain 2007,Özkan and Foster 2005), or as having certain specific desirable social properties that are associated with the prototypical consumer, for example ‘cool’, ‘cute’ (Allison 2000, 2004, Iwabuchi 2002, 2004), or even secular ‘culturedness’ (Gronow 2003, Kelly and Volkov 1998) or religious piety (Jain 2007). So what then, is the meaning of brand as it relates to business cards? Or of these particular business cards?
As brand objects attract more properties of subjects, whether of producers or of consumers, we come squarely into the vexed category of the brand as a fetish (especially when we talk about these business cards), or at least, certain aspects of that notoriously polysemous entity, specifically those having to do with the conflation of categories of subject and object. Do these cards represent nothing more then themselves? Have the been elevated to the level of fetish-object that they no longer signify me, but only themselves?
It is at this point, too, that analysts turn from Marx to Mauss, often finding in brand a kind of curious image of the Maussian ‘total social fact’. So the question remains – what is the meaning of this brand-image? What things have been conveyed with the sign-image of these cards? Are these cards nothing more than festish-images? I don’t know.
I do know is that, as a designer, I have finally designed cards that I feel comfortable with.
Much thanks to the great people at Publicide who say my designs, didn’t faint, and worked diligently to make them to specification while allowing me to stop in regularly to check on the progress. If you need high-end letterpress printers, let me know and I will connect you with them
Special thanks to Todd Hoza who did photography for this cards.