Back in 1999 I started doing my business cards styled after Polaroids. Since then I’ve done a bunch of different “Polaroid Cards,” some of which I’ve attached after the jump. As you’ll see they’re designed and printed to look just like a polaroid photo (down to the large black square and type on the rear, which I use for contact info). When I started doing them, Polaroids were still widely available, and it was more of a visual pun. Clients tend to hold onto them, and it’s always been a more interesting way to display work, than a stock 4×6 card. Now that Polaroid has discontinued their 600 films, it’s more of a historical nod than anything. Come to think of it, the background image of the header graphic at the top of this very site is a polaroid 600 image of some old letraset press type I have kicking around. Two dying breeds for sure.

Recently Polaroid dropped an online Polaroid generator. It’s a great, fun little tool that makes something old new again. You have to download an application from the site, and from their you can drag and drop photos into it. If you start with a high resolution photo, you end up with a decent quality photo (1392×1692 pixels).

The sample above is one I had on my desktop of Axel Jurgens that was taken for a Profile Racing advertisement. It made the perfect guinea pig for the generator. While it’s no substitute for a tactile polaroid that you hold in your hand, it is a fun little tool and one that I’m sure will see tremendous overuse in the future. For now, you can still find Polaroid film out there if you try, so get it while you can.

Below are some samples of the business cards I’ve been doing since the late ’90s. A few of the early cards were actually shot with Polaroid 600 film, however many of the more recent cards use images ranging from 6×6 film to digital.