Think quick! I was between identities and I didn’t have a business card ready to hand out at this great networking event I was about to be off to in mere hours! What to do, what to do!?

My solution: Customize. Make it fit. Make it one-off. Make it memorable.

Normally customization means more time and high production value. At the time, I had just moved to New York and I had acquired a habit of keeping the itemized receipts of places I’d been to as what I called “organic souvenirs” - naturally occurring and (most importantly) free memorabilia. I channelled the two ideas together to quickly pool into the useful application of “FRESH MEAT” series cards.

I styled them “Fresh Meat” to capitalize on my willingness to be shredded to bits just to show that I could have a useful contribution to potential employers and freelance clients; the idea was to remind you where you met me, what we talked about, how clever I was, and where you could find me. I encoded my contact information into receipt form, a moment glancing over the card and you’d note that the purchased items and the “prices” were weird looking and the “Total” was a web address.

I liked the evanescent nature of receipts, and I wanted to use some interesting paper stock, so I pulled out some translucent vellum to print the receipt cards on. I finished the effect off by first using some pinking shears, then on later versions I found some Fiskars fancy shears to put a torn edge on each edge of the receipts. In the end, I just ended up employing the fine art of the torn-edge, or deckling if you want a 25-cent word, to put the finishing touch on the initial line of cards.

I handed them out at an AIGA event appropriately enough about “Branding Yourself”, where the speaker emphasized the value of keeping an authentic message. It was fairly well-received and I was honored to get a listing on the uber-cool site YourBusinessCardSucks.com (http://www.yourbusinesscardsucks.com/2010/09/28/fresh-meat/)

I continued this series, adapting as the events changed, but keeping the same basic idea - state the place, the time, hide my info just to be clever, try to be interesting and useful, say thank you.

I adapted the kind of receipt based on the event, a ticket-stub for the AIGA viewing of the Milton Glaser film To Inform and Delight. You can see all the event info and my contact information, as well as the mono-font and perforation on the edge to mimic ticket stub-iness.

This was a fun exercise in thinking on my feet and finding a cool application as a solution for a stressful problem. I liked having something different to hand out. It was whispered to me that the NY Director of the AIGA had been seen with my first-edition card on his desk. I ended up doing a custom event card for a client who liked the relevance of the idea so much she wanted one of her own for a conference in Melbourne, Australia.

This is the kind of off-center idea I like to cultivate in my design work, and while it might not always work out, one must not be afraid to color outside the lines on occasion. We must not be afraid to try things that might not work, sometimes they actually do. =)