So I have a personal card in addition to a business card, in order to avoid giving too much information to people just met, but still be able to participate in the card exchange ritual that is so omnipresent in interactions in Asia. The design of the personal card is simple – Garamond, 10pt, three lines: [name] [name in Chinese], [phone number], [e-mail address]. The near universal response from locals is: what scant content! Westerners mostly like it. White space is important to our comfort level, perhaps. Having given the subject a bit more thought since printing, this is all that’s really necessary for a proper business card:

Contact information is mostly useless, stalking technology being what it is these days. The above contains everything you could ever need to know, including critical information about placement in a social hierarchies. Why belabor the point? These sorts of aesthetic preferences can also be generally observed in web design. Compare the QQ homepage for China:

With the QQ homepage for foreign users:

This may be due to the fact that you can reasonably fit more information into a smaller space with Chinese, given formatting of logograms. Even the Drudge report needs some space for rudimentary content organization. Interesting…