Discount Card design

Over the past couple of days I’ve been working on a discount card for use at work,

This card will be handed out at the till point in the shop to members of our loyalty scheme, and entitles them to a discount.

My first brief from my boss pretty much went like this “I need a card, make it cheap, I don’t care what it looks like, I just need some way of determining who gets discount and who doesn’t, at the moment I feel like I have no control over who gets it”

Despite my close circle of friends suggesting that I approach printing companies that are involved with booklet printing, business cards, catalogs, etc., my viewpoint was somewhat different. Yes, I know these companies can produce the perfect cards with their perfect craftsmanship and equipment like this die cutting machine. However, I believe a discount card needs to “earn its place” in people’s wallets and purses. I know from personal experience that when getting a new wallet off the wife for Christmas, I sometimes have to make sacrifices with the cards that can go back into the new one. For women, it’s a game, buy a new purse, then spend hours going through all your cards and such working out which ones are worthy of the purse real estate.

So, I pitched my idea to my boss, that instead of a rush job, we take our time, and instead of card, get it printed in plastic, I did some research and you can get 1000 cards printed, with optional extras (like signature strips and magnetic strips etc) for less than £300, which in my eyes is a bargain!!

I pitched my idea built upon the argument above, and, that if people have a really nice looking card, they are going to want to keep it in their purse, and want to use it. The hard thing at the moment is determining people who are entitled to a discount from the people who aren’t, if the card is worthwhile to keep, and its durable enough that we can enforce that fact (i.e. tell customers, no card. no discount.) then people are much more likely to keep it.

It also reinforces the brand image, and the brand image, and looks a heck of a lot better.

Luckily, my boss agreed with me, so I set about designing the card.

Here are some of the designs that didn’t make the grade. some of them only got half finished before they were binned.

Eventually we settled on this design:

The design we’ve settled on is more like what our customer base would appreciate than any of the other designs, and it has everything we need it to say, as well as being in the “company colours” and still looking modern and eye catching.

The rear of the card is yet to be designed, but will most likely be very similar to the front, with a signature strip and also a magnetic strip (for logging use/expiry dates at the till point).

The “card type” will have in that box the discount level, as some members are entitled to more discount than others. As the cards are lithographically printed they have to be made in large quantities, so we can only have one design, which means we need to have this box so we can thermally print (after the design is printed) the different discount levels onto the card.
This reduces cost, and reduces the amount of cards we will eventually get printed, as 1000 will keep us going for quite some time (hopefully!)

I would have prefered to have different designs for each discount level, but the added cost was far too great to ignore this simple work around, and, it could get confusing to have more than one type of card for the people on the till.

Hope you like my designs. By the way, if you are looking for an online printing company, make sure to check this weblink.