This week as I was organizing some of my work, I found a bunch of old business cards in the back of a drawer. I wanted to save the info on the card but not the clutter. So I scanned them in to my computer.

While feeding them into my CardScan scanner one by one, I glanced at each card to make sure that I really wanted it, but quickly decided it was better to scan them all instead of taking the time to pick and choose among them.

Most of the cards went in with no problem -- both picture and data were accurate and in the right fields. But there was that handful of cards that were so off-the-wall that I asked myself, "What were they thinking?"

I'm not talking about cards that wouldn't scan well. I'm talking about the cards that were poorly designed.

The first type was oversized: a few were only a quarter inch bigger than the norm; others were fold out cards. Most of them scanned well, but I was quick to breathe a sigh of relief as I threw them in the trash after scanning.

There was a reason that they landed in the back of my drawer instead of in my normal business card file. They don't fit. Anybody who prints a nonstandard-size card should be aware that the card is likely to go straight to the circular file just because there is no place good to keep it. No wonder I hadn't seen those cards in years.

Next is the nonstandard layout. My CardScan was very good about finding the correct information to place into the proper fields when scanning into my database. But my eyes were not as good. It is simply too difficult to find the info when it's placed creatively instead of in a standard position. It's not that it's painfully difficult, but it puts the burden of finding it on the recipient, slowing him down -- especially for older readers and those without good eyesight.

Of course, there also are cards with strange fonts and small, almost unreadable print. Those cause problems for both scanner and human.

Some business people forget their grammar and put all characters in lower case. Since the scanner takes the data as printed, I had to go through those cards and change the names of streets, cities and states to start with a capital letter. Didn't they learn anything in second grade? All lower case should be reserved for e-mail addresses.

One card was so bad, it had small fonts, all lower-case letters, some info oriented in portrait and some in landscape and nothing in the order that you expect. The front of the card said "We're Out There." They sure are.

The worst card I found, though, wins the booby prize hands-down. It's printed on both sides of semi-see-through stock in muted colors. Tiny fonts; letters and words that run together; no contrast between the words to distinguish them easily from the white translucent background; and to top it off, the words on the back of the card made it difficult to read the words on the front because they were printed right behind them on the translucent stock. It's as if the creators actually wanted to stymie the reader's ability to read the card. Well, mission accomplished.