The Card Way

Tuesday, April 20, 1999 | 9:48 a.m.

Mel Larson lost his favorite pet, a cat named Keeke, to leukemia five years ago.

But in the wallets and Rolodexes of Larson's friends and colleagues, Keeke lives forever.

Thanks to Larson's quirky imagination (this is a man who once chauffeured clients over Las Vegas in a hot-pink helicopter) and trick photography courtesy of Amazing Pictures, Keeke and Larson share space on a novelty business card.

"I went into an Amazing Pictures booth with a picture of my cat's face," said Larson, a former vice president at Circus Circus who works as a professional helicopter pilot. "I took two pictures, one of me and one of the cat."

Amazing Pictures specializes in morphing multiple faces into a single image and has installed booths at Circus Circus, Excalibur and Luxor hotels, among other locations. When Larson saw the resulting photograph (which is kicked out of a side slot in just minutes), he had a vision.

"I thought it would make a neat business card," he said. "I thought it would strike up conversation and would be fun for me to pass out to people."

Larson (who struck up conversation in a nearly fatal way in October 1998 when he crash-landed a helicopter carrying himself and his wife Marilyn at Las Vegas Motor Speedway) is one who uses a business card for more than just business.

"I'll pull them out at parties and show them around," Larson said. "I'm always looking for something different. Once I had a pink business card to match my pink helicopter. I look at is a way to get people to be interested in you."

Business cards in Las Vegas are as diverse, unique and entertaining as the city itself. Even casual collectors can stumble across clear plastic cards, cards with simulated burnt edges and gold-embossed seals, psychedelic cards bringing to mind bad hallucinations, double-sided fold-out cards and cards shaped like giant silver stars.

The latter approach is favored by Kathleen Ragan, owner of Divine Madness Fantasy Wedding Chapel on the Strip near Fremont Street Experience. Divine Madness specializes in themed weddings ranging from a "Star Trek" motif to country-western to sado-masochism.

Ragan chose the star design to evoke an image of fantasy.

"I love stars. I have a star sitting atop my building," she said. "I thought it would be a unique design and it's not something you'd want to keep in your wallet. It's something you would put on your desk or hang on your refrigerator."

By using a unique design and special color of ink, Ragan paid a high-end price for her unusual card, investing $120 in her first 500. Plain white cards with black lettering run around $20 for 500.

"The ink makes it more expensive," said Marci Snow of Kwik Copy Printing, the business that printed the Divine Madness cards. "With gold or silver ink, any spec of black will show up on a card so you have to double-wash the press to make sure it's extra, extra clean."

An expert in the business of business cards for nearly two decades, Snow is no fan of exotic, wacky or otherwise divergent cards.

"Essentially, when you give someone your card, you've already made contact and it's just supposed to be an easy way to get your number out," Snow said. "It's not an advertisement, but in some cases people use them as ads. It's needless. If you haven't made an impression by the time you give them your card, you're not going to get their business anyway."

Snow said business cards should be kept simple, in part because of the multitude of outlets used in day-to-day information gathering.

"You've got e-mail, cellular phone numbers, office phone numbers, beepers, websites, so many ways to get hold of people these days," Snow said. "Once you get all the needed information on a card, there's no room for anything else and people aren't gong to read it, anyway.

"You might as well pay for a pamphlet, because that's what you're ordering."

Of course, Ragan is among the many local business owners who disagree.

"Everyone loves my cards, it's a unique thing to hand somebody," she said. "They like them so much that they don't put them away. It's a real psychological thing."

The ever-competitive hotel-casino industry has produced a predictable variety of cards. The Station casinos feature a locomotive, the Rio and Fiesta are graced with multicolored logos giving a sense of fun, Bellagio uses its cursive letter "B" on its official logo, Mirage has what looks to be melting colored palm trees, and Circus Circus utilizes its ubiquitous fanatical clown face.

"You want a logo in a lot of cases because you want a mental picture for people to remember," Snow said. "A company logo can be effective if it's not too distracting."

At Caesars Palace, employees always receive a response when handing out their curved, burnt-edged business cards carrying the gold-embossed company logo.

"We've had the same type of cards since opening in 1966," said Phil Cooper, Caesars' vice president of public relations and advertising. "It's a traditional design for us, a classic design with the burnt-edged scroll. We've always had it and you continually get a reaction, both in Las Vegas and our Tahoe property. It's an interesting way to have a card and everyone likes it."

Doctors, lawyers and health-care professionals typically use the no-bells-and-whistles approach (a urologist with a clown-faced card might lack patients, for example), as do collegiate institutions.

Whether it's UNLV, Hofstra or Colorado Mines, cards carried by university employees all carry the same stately message: We work at a smart place.

Consequently, there's no Hey Reb (UNLV's sneering costumed mascot) depicted on UNLV President Carol Harter's business card.

"We have a standardized form and it's very clean, clear and simple," Les Raschko, director of publications/reprographics at UNLV, said. "We've always wanted to have the same card for every department and we've tried to squash the great variety of cards you can have at a university.

"Prior to 1990, we had numerous institutional logos. We wanted to have a continuity of imagery and less confusion."

The philosophy related to business cards, to borrow a time-honored phrase, can make for strange bedfellows.

"The best business cards have big block letters with a name and phone number," Snow said. "The best belong to writers and prostitutes."

Prostitutes?

"Oh, yeah," she said. "We've done a lot of them and you can find them in those gravel ashtrays downtown or on the Strip. It has their photo, whatever name they're using and number. Nothing else."

It makes sense. For those who advertise, "For a good time, call ..." the customer has to know where to call.

archive