Business Cards Blow

No, this isn't going to be a post about networking.  Instead it's a post about prototyping.  I was browsing the local Sam's Club and came across a great deal on DIY business cards.  $5 for 100 sheets of 10 cards each.  You just print on them and then tear along the nice perforation.  I thought, "Hey, that'd sure save me some time cutting out cards for prototypes..."

So I bought them.  I spent an hour or two the first night making up a template I liked.  I did it in excel just so I could apply some formulas and conditional formating to the color of the cards.  By the end of that night I thought it was all laid out nicely.

Then the next night I went to print them.  Gah!  That was madness.  Mainly the printer kept wanting to start the image right at the edge of the paper instead of the 0.5" margin I told it.  After an hour of curses, I finally figured out it couldn't register the edge of the paper correctly since there was that perforated fold near the edge.  So I did a slight fold vertically down a long fold to trick the printer into better registering where the paper began.

That did the trick nicely and the template more or less lined up with the business cards.  So I printed off a deck and went about punching it out.  Took no time at all.

Then I tried to solo a round with the new deck.   Horrible.  Couldn't fan the cards.  Couldn't shuffle the cards.  Complete crap.

So I wasted more than a few hours, ink and perspiration just to learn I should have stuck to making decks my old way.

Bah humbug.