Designing a business card for a single person (as opposed to creating a template to be used by many cards with different names) has an important advantage: You can position and align your text objects precisely, without having to leave extra space for variable-length names and addresses. In this case, I was able to push all the address bits closely against the name, creating an asymmetric composition tightly bound together by its alignments (the address is aligned with the start of the last name, the email with the top of the name, etc.).
This already looks interesting—but perhaps a little too rectangular. An obvious thing to try is to select all (
) and rotate a bit (press 
once). Much better! The design now has a flair of constructivism—a short-lived but influentional movement of the 1920s whose proponents loved bold contrasts and running texts at an angle (though they probably would not have approved of the Gentium font). Let’s develop this style; add three black corners intruding into the composition from the edges and place a big red circle in the mass center of the composition, as shown in Figure 19-4. (Constructivists loved simple geometric forms in black and red!)
To look their best, most text objects require adjusting of letter spacing (uniform spacing between all letters in the text) and kerning (intervals between some particular letter pairs). In the Text tool, use 
, 
to change letter spacing and 
-arrows to change kerning at the text cursor (15.3.3 Kerning). Generally, large text objects look better with tighter letter spacing, while small type needs increased letter spacing for readability.
