Business cards have proven to be the best cost effective way of business networking. Earlier all of the business cards exchanged used to be stored in desk or a card holder. But nowadays business card scanners are used for scanning business cards and storing the contact information on to ipad or pc. These scanners come with OCR(optical character recognizer) which can easily scan and transfer contacts to the contact management systems. As more and more people are switching to business card scanners, one need make sure that his business card is scanner friendly. Here are so do and don't for making your business card user friendly.
Things to be taken care of
1)Fonts: Avoid using fancy fonts as scanner may confuse the character. Use big and clear fonts. The best thing would be to use big and clean fonts.
2)Name and other text: Avoid putting all the information like your name, title etc in a single line. Just putting commas for separations can be distinguished by human eye but not scanner. For this reason use proper spacing so that ocr can distinguish and scan data properly.
3)Text overlaying is strictly not for a scanner friendly, as it would not be scanned properly. Keep it clear.
4)Alignment: keep all the text aligned horizontally as ocr's find tough scanning vertically aligned text.
5)Background: Avoid using dark backgrounds for your business cards,as it results in poor scanning. Prefer using light background and dark font colors.
6)Double sided business cards: Scanners can just scan one side, so preferable put your important contact information on one side. Rather than putting information on the both sides of business cards.
Hope you find this information worth and you make your
business card design scanner friendly.