Playing with pattern backgrounds

Creating repeating geometric shapes is a good way to spend those hours when neural activity is just too sluggish for anything else, or when you wish to give expression to your OCD within.

A pattern background can be the starting place for a business card design. This pattern is much too busy to be used as-is. There's no place to put your text so that it will be visible.

Translucent overlays are useful for creating room for contrasting text, but resist the temptation to do the conventional. There may be a time and a place for brown and rectangular boring, but I'd say it's an exception.

Combining the patterned background with overlaying translucency of various shapes, along with blurs, fades, filters and art, produces interesting results.

Introducing backgrounds

It's my best guess that many business card designers are still working within the technical restraints that existed in the color printing industry in the past. Solid colors are safe, and a smooth gradient fade is now technically possible.

But color printing technology has come much further than that. Intricate and subtle color printing is possible now. A bazillion interesting printed backgrounds are an easy and inexpensive way to jazz up even the most basic layout. Business cards can look better.

Maybe designers need less vector design and more raster design, and it's an Adobe Illustrator vs. Photoshop thing.

Variation on a bizcard theme - 2

I suppose the natural tendency is to darken a dark photograph even more in order to create the necessary blank area for contrasting text. That's what I did in my prior sample, in Photoshop tip - variation on a theme 1

This, however, is my preferred variation: