Patent Application
20070267863
This invention relates generally to business cards. More specifically, the invention relates to a business card including a multi-year calendar.
Many professionals, such as sales persons, managers, and business owners, utilize business cards as a portion of promoting their business or affiliations. Business cards generally include contact information such as name, address, phone number, title and business or affiliation. Some cards include logos as well as other graphical devices intended to convey a positive image of the professional or business. Indeed, many other entities also use business cards, even though the entity may or may not be “for profit.” For example, churches and/or synagogues may use business cards for clerics. Thus, the term “business” as used herein encompasses businesses that are for profit, not for profit, associated with secular or nonsecular entities and otherwise has a broad definition.
Some professionals and business people desire that the card be viewed frequently by recipients and include useful information on the card in an attempt to ensure frequent usage. Often, this useful information includes a one year calendar. However, one year calendar cards lose much of their useful advantages after the calendar has passed. For example, a card with a 2005 calendar is useful only for a sense of history after 2005. The size of business cards limits the length of ordinary calendars, and generally only one year is defined by a business card calendar—after passage of the year, the calendar loses utility. Additionally, prior cards do not incorporate important date information, such as holidays or time changes. Smaller font sizes are difficult to read and bigger cards do not fit in common card-sized holders, such as wallets, Rolodex® carriers or the like.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a business card and method that overcomes the aforementioned and other disadvantages.
One aspect of the invention provides a business card that includes a front face and a back face, the front face including contact information and the back face including a one day per week multi-year calendar defining a plurality of years.
Another aspect of the invention provides a method of printing a business card. The method includes printing contact information on a front face of a card, and printing a one day per week multi-year calendar defining a plurality of years on a back face of the card.
Yet another aspect of the invention provides a method of promoting a business. This method includes determining a selected day based on the business, printing a card, the card comprising contact information and a one day per week multi-year calendar defining a plurality of years, the day based on the selected day, and distributing the card to a plurality of customers.
The aforementioned, and other features and advantages of the invention will become further apparent from the following detailed description of the presently preferred embodiments, read in conjunction with the accompanying drawings. The detailed description and drawings, which are not to scale, are merely illustrative of the invention rather than limiting, the scope of the invention being defined by the appended claims and equivalents thereof.
In addition, front face 100 includes a day of interest portion 120 including day of interest information 125, and as shown in
The calendar is presented, for example, in a tabular format, with each year displayed in a column and each selected day for a given month displayed in a row with the given month. In one embodiment, additional visual reference lines are printed, for example, every three rows, to assist in reading. In one embodiment, a numeric representation of the month (i.e. 1=January, 2=February) is displayed in a first column 255 on a first side, while an alphabetic representation of the month (i.e. J=January, F=February or JAN=January, FEB=February) is displayed in a second column 260 opposing the first column 255. A notation 225 of the selected day (i.e “ALL MONDAYS”) is displayed.
In one embodiment, method 300 includes printing the contact information on a first portion of the front face and the one day per week multi-year calendar is printed on a second portion of the back face. In one embodiment, the method includes scoring the card to provide a fold line for folding the card between the first portion and the second portion to create a “fold-over”.
Based on the selected day, method 400 prints a card comprising contact information and a one day per week multi-year calendar defining a plurality of years at step 420. The printed card is then distributed to a plurality of customers at step 430. As used herein, the term “customer” means any potential or existing business partner or source of business. The card can be distributed in any number of methods, including personal contact, mail, or the like. Additionally, in one embodiment, the card is scored and folded along the score to create a folded card.
While the embodiments of the invention disclosed herein are presently considered to be preferred, various changes and modifications can be made without departing from the spirit and scope of the invention. The scope of the invention is indicated in the appended claims, and all changes that come within the meaning and range of equivalents are intended to be embraced therein.
