blog.jaredsinclair.com
Iʼm Jared Sinclair. I make iOS apps at Riposte, Streamweaver and Pillboxie. I used to be a registered ICU nurse.
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Designing Great Business Cards
The goals I look for in a top-notch business card: a gorgeous logo; a crisp logotype; and clean, spacious contact info that leaves room for the customer to jot down a note.
Business cards are objects in themselves. Unlike a magazine page or a sheet of photo paper, a business card isn’t a medium on which one displays content. The card itself is the content. It’s a tangible artifact. This is why the best cards tend to use things like thick paper stock, letterpress, and foil stamping. Cards that don’t use these things are an imitation of a real card.
Some cards that I think accomplish the important goals:
- Mike Hall
- Unboundary
- Weway
- Milky
- Vief (pictured above)
Photographs on business cards are uncommon, at least among high-end cards. The reason is that a photo is an abstraction that detracts from the tangible experience of a well-made card — like the difference between solid wood and a veneer.
A photo on a card is easy to get wrong. When it’s done well, a photo can help enhance the desired experience. Look at the Vief card pictured above for a great example. Notice how the photo is blurred, and fills the frame. The photo wasn’t included to show a picture of a flower, but to add texture and color behind the stark clean silhouette of the logo. Imagine feeling the edge of the foil-stamped logo under your thumb as it slides across the back of the card.
For the curious, here’s the business card I designed for Splint:
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The EMR Nurses Need
Among the litany of complaints about the (un)usability of EMRs, it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture. More than the poor design choices and overall ugliness of existing software, by far the single biggest failure of HIT companies is that none of them has yet to produce an EMR that nurses actually need.
There is a huge opportunity being wasted here. Other industries have been able to incorporate computers in such a way that removing them from the workplace would be unthinkable. Photographers and musicians are producing high-quality content in less time and with less money in digital studios. Executives are monitoring every aspect of their businesses, from supply chain logistics to sales, in real time, even while on the go. President Obama made the Blackberry a non-negotiable component of his administration.We’re not dreaming big enough. The intrinsic value of technology is it’s ability to provide solutions to problems we never knew we had. Remember having to tell the neighbor to get off the party line so you don’t miss an important call? Remember not being able to go out on the weekend because the banks don’t open until Monday and you have no cash? I don’t. A few bright minds solved these problems for me before I ever knew I had them.
Other than billing or records, what problems does an EMR really solve? In their current state, EMRs add nothing of value to our work as nurses. They are tedious chores at best, outright obstacles at worst. They are database portals where we type some numbers and check some boxes, and nothing more.
Meanwhile, our nation’s nurses continue to take and receive shift reports on folded up pieces of printer paper. They place bits of silk tape on door frames to remind them of pending lab draws. They sometimes give scheduled medications late because their iPhones don’t have EMR apps that might take advantage of iOS 4’s support for local notifications and beep them at the proper time. They lug around laptops bolted to enormous rolling carts or wait in line for a free desktop PC because they can’t chart their morning assessments on the iPod Touches in their pockets.
Nursing is a profession of the clock. It is task-oriented. It has a lot of routine. It consumes data as fast as it can produce it. In other words, it is exactly the kind of job that cries out for a technological revolution.
