Historically, the business card and the visiting card remained crucial but entirely separate components of the general social milieu in 19th century America. Business card printing gained popularity as printing technology advanced – the cards could provide directions to a business and presented special promotions, much as they do today. But generally business card printing was a reserved art and the cards reflected a relative sobriety and uniformity. People carried both business cards and visiting cards in clean, understated designs with equal ubiquity but for wholly different reasons.
Any visit to a friend's home would be accompanied by the prerequisite visiting card. A stack of visiting cards in the front hall would enable hosts to keep track of gifts received, favors owed, and reciprocation yet to be delivered. Although business card printing and visiting card printing remained essentially the same task with only subtly different products, confusing a business card with a visiting card was inviting a potential social faux pas – a business card used in place of a visiting card implied the nature of the ostensibly social visit to be in actuality a business transaction. This kind of social transgression surely provided for awkward situations – a purely innocent visit could turn ugly if the business card suddenly evoked an entirely different dynamic in which debt-collecting was the goal of stopping by. Although societal rules governing business cards played a role in social interactions to a certain degree a century ago, they hardly factor into social dynamics now in any potentially offensive way.
Flyer Printing