What about using one of those little photo printers? I bet it could be easily hacked to print cheaply on 3x5’s. Just an idea, no base in fact.

My advice:

Buy some cardstock and a good papercutter.

Design cards of any shape you like… cheap.

I should reformat my hipster cards to be just flat 3x5 paper size for this. hehe.

Get the Avery 5388 index cards and use the template in Word. In Word, use Format—>Text Direction to make it print vertically.

I hold all my contacts in an Excel spreadsheet and mail-merge them into a 2-column Word document that I print on an index card. If you have good eyesight, you can choose a really small font and cram your whole address book on a single card. It’s easy to update too.

I really don’t like the avery cards, they’re yellow, not white, and that’s distracting under good light. Also, they have perforations along the edge.

fuss

And the effort involved in cutting paper to a perfect size is very not trivial. On my “when I can afford it” section of “Someday maybe” is a cheapass dedicated printer to run off sets of index cards on demand.

When I’m allowed to use a computer again… oh, wait. :)

Anon: Have you actually looked at the Avery cards? They are astoundingly expensive.

I’ve been doing this for a-g-e-s. Thought it was ‘obvious’. If you have a team/family it lets you reproduce cards for multiple people easily. Even if not everybody is using the Hipster they like having information compact and handy.

3x5’s can turn into new address cards to hand out, maps to the house, Project contact lists, Committee rosters (not everyone is geeky and wants an email). Their size makes them stand out from all the other papers people get handed.

The first company I worked for out of college had scratch pads marked “Avoid Oral Instructions”.
It always comes to mind when I hand information to someone.

I’m a teacher and have made a pile of custom templates (some in wordperfect, until I realized the print function was dying a slow death; now they’re in Open Office … set your margins around for .25; text 8 pt Verdana). I’ve got cards for day-specific todo lists (some days I have a pile of stuff I have to do just on that day); I’ve got checklists for each class to check homework completion, for recording contacts with parents, etc.. Whenever I give a test, I make a card with the ‘official expectations’ covered in that test and if a student has glaring problems with one or more, I just check off a little bubble so when I’m doing my report card comments I’m not trying to remember where they had problems.

The first company I worked for out of college had scratch pads marked “Avoid Oral Instructions”. It always comes to mind when I hand information to someone.

I think I might have to make that my new motto. “Avoid Oral Instructions.” That’s good. :)