About Lucerne Pacific, Inc.
Lucerne Pacific, Inc. is a powered energy solutions provider in California. They’re dedicated to transforming the way energy is utilized and making renewable energy work better for everyone. Their primary offerings include custom-designed solar panel arrays and battery backup systems.
With an impressive portfolio of both standalone systems and microgrids, Lucerne Pacific, Inc. is a key player in energy sustainability in California.
I’m also proud to say that their principal engineer is one of my closest friends from when I attended Santa Clara University.
Solving the client’s need
Lucerne Pacific, Inc. asked me to design business cards for the upcoming RE+ Clean Energy Convention in Las Vegas, NV. They already had some for a few team members, but the information on them was outdated. After a discussion with them, we settled on these parameters:
- Minimal graphics to avoid visual clutter
- Equal balance between the team member’s information and the business information
- Flexible layout for different team member needs
The design
I started with the logo and company contact information. To allow enough room for team member contact information, I kept the company info to just the upper half of the card.
For more flexibility, I chose a two-column layout for the team member info. Since the email address’s domain name is fairly long, this allows me to move the email and phone number up or down as needed for better visual balance.
I wanted the most emphasis on the team member’s name, so that’s a larger font size, a darker value, and a heaver weight. The job title is all caps as well, but in the smaller font size and dark gray so it doesn’t overshadow the name.
The last design element I added was a faint, faded-out copy of just the graphical element of the Lucerne Pacific logo. This functions a bit like a watermark; it’s subtle enough not to distract, but still reinforces the brand.
Printing
For the first batch, since Lucerne Pacific, Inc. only needed a small quantity, I chose to print them in-house. I have a large format, professional-tier inkjet printer so that I can print proofs of my design work and confirm my design files’ color settings are correct. Usually this is just for my own use, but for cases like this, it’s not cost-effective to send only a small print run to a third party so I’ll make the finished product in-house.
I used bright white heavy paper stock with a luxury matte finish, since I’ve found matte-finish cards to be easier to read in brightly lit convention halls. This prevents glare from the lights on the surface of the card, and also gives the colors a rich, vibrant look to them. The back of the cards are all blank to allow people to write notes on them, and the matte finish also easily accepts both pencil and pen of all varieties.