Business Stationery Design

Stationery feels like a legacy purchase until you need it. A quotation, a contract, an invoice, a formal letter — these still travel as paper or as PDFs formatted like paper, and how they look affects how the sender is read.

The set is small. Getting it right once means it works for years.

What we design

Letterhead, with a second sheet for continuation pages. Business cards, 85 × 55 mm, at a weight that survives a wallet. Compliment slips, which do more relationship work than their cost suggests. Envelopes, DL and C4. Presentation folders, with a die-cut card slot. Invoice and quotation templates — sent far more often than letters, and usually the least designed thing a company produces. Email signature, the highest-frequency branded item you own.

Two versions of everything

The mistake we see most often is a stationery set delivered only as print-ready PDFs.

Nobody types a letter into a PDF. What happens instead is that someone recreates an approximation in Word, and that approximation quietly becomes your real letterhead.

So we deliver both:

Print version — press-ready with bleed, for professional printing
Digital version — a Word or Google Docs template with the design in the header and footer, margins that the software can actually match, and enough room left for a real letter

Design constraints we work to

Header and footer take no more than 20% of the page. A letterhead that fills a third of the sheet leaves too little for the content it exists to carry.

Letterhead stock must run through office equipment. Heavy or textured paper jams laser printers. If in doubt we test a small quantity before committing to a run.

No full-bleed backgrounds on letterhead. Office printers cannot print to the edge, and your team will print in the office.

Required detail built into the footer — trade licence number, registered address, whatever your obligations require — rather than added ad hoc by whoever is typing.

Print specification

Item	Stock
Letterhead and second sheet	100–120 gsm
Compliment slip	120–170 gsm
Business card	350 gsm
Envelope	100–120 gsm
Folder	300–350 gsm, die required

3 mm bleed, 4–5 mm safe area, CMYK with your printer's profile, Pantone references for brand colours, 300 dpi, fonts outlined.

What you receive

Press-ready PDFs for every item
Editable Word or Google Docs templates
Email signature as tested HTML, with installation instructions
Layered source files
Printer specification sheet — stock, weight, finish
Written transfer of ownership on final payment

What we will tell you honestly

Order conservatively. Details change — an address, a number, a person's role — and a box of 2,000 obsolete letterheads is a familiar sight in storerooms.

If your budget is limited, spend it on the invoice, quotation, and email signature. Those are used daily. Print the letterhead in a small quantity for the occasions that genuinely need paper.

Stationery design