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Messing about…
Here we go with Tahoma
The text underneith looks a bit blocky to me. Tahoma looks like Arial to me, which is Grotesque made to look like Helvetica. So lets take a look in Helvetica it’s self.
Note the difference in the e and a. Still looks a little heavy so lets go to Neu Helvetica, which I have in a light version.
Not only is it a bit lighter it’s a bit more stylish and geometric. The round charaters are more circular. Franklin Gothic is a step further in this dirrection. Here’s another font that goes further in that dirrection. News Gothic.
Had to get rid of the bold as it made things imballanced. Bit Art Decco? OK lets go further. Less geometry but some vertical stress with Optima (which in some ways is half way between a serif and a sans-serif font).
OK lets stick some serifs in for a more femanin (weddings/life style portrait) and slightly softer and traditional (fine art landscape) look. Baskerville.
And here’s what you get for 30 Euro if you buy a profesional OpenType font and turn on ligatures and alternative chars for the top line. Similar to Baskerville, this ones Warnock Pro.
flip it over
I’m not sure how ‘modern’ you design is. It looks a bit late 80s to me, a bit sterio typical ‘fashion photographer’, and bares little relation to the kind of photography you’ve listed (I have to ask why you’re pitching for weddings and landscapes and yet your web site mostly has motobikes on it).
I think you’ve realised it your self but the over all color balance is all over the place. The least relevent information sticks out and the text font is to heavy and conjested.
The details not quite right either. For instance the phone numbers aren’t formatted consistently. In the first two the kerning on the Capital letters is too wide. the email address is impersonal, where as the card is personal.
Fixing things up a bit…
OK that’s not going to win any awards for originality but the over all layout is more balanced. The text font (Gill Sans light) is in line with the size of the card, doesn’t compete with the ‘Steven Hanna’ for attention but isn’t overwelmed either. The ‘Steven Hanna’ heading is the uneque thing that identifies the the card when someone is looking for it so I’ve applied a spot colour. Over all I’ve gone for fonts that softern things up. The distressed heading (The King & Queen font avaiable from http://www.dafont.com) is reasonably trendy and, when used here, gives you a more natural style i.e. ‘fine art landscape’ rather than ‘neo-dada hairdresser’.
With a stripped down design like this, things like a sattin laminate or embossed lettering realy work well.
Business cards have two sides. Use one for style and one for info. With a simple layout like the above on one side printing a colourful image, like your photo of the blue bell wood, on the reverse make a nice contrast. Just having a strong solid colour on the reverse with ‘Steven Hanna’ in white or a pale tone would works as well.
