iPrint.com

Pros: Flexible, quick, customizable, inexpensive
Cons: Slightly clunky website
Rating: 4.5 out of 5

First published 2/14/2005

I first heard about iPrint.com in The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Magazine Articles. I’d been intending to get business cards anyway, so it seemed like fortuitous timing. The book was a couple of years old, and I decided that if the site was still around, I’d give it a try. Sure enough, it was.

Designing business cards

iPrint.com offers a great deal of flexibility, allowing you to tailor not only the look and feel of your items as you choose, but also their quality and price. If you want simple and inexpensive you can easily get two-color business cards (with or without a graphic) on plain white paper. You can change things from there, however, adding colors, printing on both sides of the card, or using a nicer quality or color of paper.

You start with one of their business card templates, but this doesn’t mean you’re stuck with their pre-generated designs. From there you can alter almost anything, including font, color, and layout. There are business cards with sideways designs, two-sided business cards, full-color business cards, and templates from the elegantly simple to the designed-for-specific-industries. There are cards with and without graphics, and you can use one of their graphics or upload your own.

I found it very easy to design my card the way I wanted it. The site will store your design for two weeks so you can think about it, or dig up just the right graphic, or whatever you want. If you actually order the design it’ll store it for two years so you can conveniently reorder (and yes, you can make further changes when you reorder it). You can order as few as 250 cards, so the site caters to individuals and small businesses as well as those with greater needs.

A wide range of products

Business cards are far from their only product, however. They also do stationery, letterhead, pre-printed envelopes, self-inking address stamps (which, by the way, produce very nice and neat addresses that practically look printed) or rubber stamps, business forms, magnets, invitations, memo pads, mouse pads, signs, post-it notes, and so on. They also do consumer products such as custom T-shirts, photo mugs, party invitations, etc.

Web site use and customer service

The web site is sometimes a little clunky for all that the product design interface itself is very slick. The navigation menu isn’t present on all pages, and it’s sometimes hard to find your way directly from one place to another. I like the fact that the site recommends related items as you add things to your cart, though, or I never would have thought to grab a spare bottle of ink for that self-inking stamp.

iPrint.com sends out order and shipping confirmation emails, and it’s easy to track your shipment by UPS. My orders have arrived in a timely and undamaged fashion, and everyone who sees the business cards has commented on how elegant and wonderful they look (and these are simple two-color cards with no graphic on white paper). I’d like to take the credit for that with my frobbing around with their customizing tools, of course, but the truth is I just made a couple of tiny changes to a pre-existing template.

So far I’ve been extremely pleased with my iPrint.com experience, and I certainly plan to go back to them when I need to buy further business items!