The business card web page; now with 99% less bullshit
Friday, 28 January 2011
At EddMorgan.com there lives a small, single-page website that I maintain. A ‘business card website’ seems to be the term commonly appropriated to pages such as these, and rightly so. They are meant to be a single location to which you can send people that offers basic details about yourself, such as how to get in contact with you, or what you actually do for a living — similar to the physical business cards made of dead trees that get firehosed out by conference attendees and subsequently scrunched into magazine holder pockets on flights home, never to be seen again.
Unfortunately, the straightforward nature of these pages often encourages over-design. People perceive the lack of moving parts as an invitation to add some of their own, bedazzling the thing with overzealous colours and JavaScript effects. In the latest iteration of mine, I’ve taken quite the opposite approach. Almost as a design statement in itself, the colour palette is restricted to black, white, some intermediate shades and a sprinkling of blue. In surrounding the content with nothing, the user is pretty much forced to take notice of the intricacies of the typeface (FF Tisa and Adelle, if you must know) — and by ‘noticing the intricacies’, I mean appreciating that it actually isn’t all in Times New Roman — and dare I say it, actually comprehend the content.
Nothing more, nothing less; just an unassuming, web-accessible first impression of me: straight to the point, no bullshit. It’s oddly liberating.
