#Ingenious business card is a circuit board that is also a working keyboard

We pass business cards around as a way to help people remember us when they need to contact us, but most business cards are really just pieces of board paper with information printed on them. They’re not big enough to list all your noteworthy achievements, let alone showcase your talents. In other words, many of them are forgettable, unless you yourself left quite an impression when you left your card with people.

Some people do craft stylish and elaborate business cards, but their novelty fades easily, and so do the memories. It’s quite a design challenge to make such a small object represent you in the best way possible, which is what makes this rather creative solution even more impressive by showing off electrical engineering prowess with a tiny keyboard the size of a business card.

Designer: Ricardo Daniel de Paula

We’ve all seen tiny keyboards for smartphones and other devices, but those are still big enough to accommodate an average thumb size. This Keyboard Business Card, in contrast, is literally the size of a business card, so there’s not much in the way of comfortable typing. Of course, that’s not the point of this design anyway, which is to present the designer’s skills and the use of certain technologies.

Since there’s pretty much nothing like this in the market or previous DIY projects, it had to be designed from scratch with very little in the way of reference. At first glance, it looks simply like an elaborate business card that just happens to have a PCB (printed circuit board) and geeky theme, except for the text that clearly states that it’s a fully functional keyboard. Well, a fully functional 40% keyboard, at least.

The card springs to life thanks to a USB-C connector in the upper right corner of the card. It doesn’t go into detail, but it will likely plug into a USB-C cable that’s connected to a device like a computer. It would probably be more convenient if you could plug the card directly into something like a Phone’s USB-C port, but the design of the plug doesn’t exactly allow for that.

Will it be a useful keyboard that you can take with you and use anywhere? Hardly, but it does get the message across. It will definitely leave a bigger impact, even if just for its design. At the very least, it also serves as a very short 8.5cm ruler, so still serves a purpose even if you will never use it for typing.