Creating your own stationery is easy, saves money - includes related article on tips for nonartists - tutorial

Home Office Computing, Feb, 1991 by Hillary Rettig

When I started my home-based computer-consulting business more than a year ago, I used letterhead consisting of my name and address, centered, in generic, laser-printed italics. I soon realized, however, that to attract the kinds of clients I wanted-small to medium-size companies-I needed to present a more professional image, and that meant custom-printed stationery.

There was only one problem: It was expensive. My local printer quoted $150 for 500 sheets and envelopes to match my business cards, plus $70 each for mailing labels and typesetting, a total of $290. This was both more than I could pay and a foolish investment, since my business was still in its formative stages and the information on my letterhead was likely to change. If, for example, I decided to change the name of my business or install a second, business-only telephone line, my stationery would become useless. SAVE MONEY, KEEP CONTROL

Necessity, as usual, was the mother of invention. Using an AT-compatible computer, WordPerfect 5.1, a PostScript laser printer, and a brown laser-toner cartridge, I designed and produced my own stationery (see figure). Five hundred sheets, envelopes, and labels would have cost roughly $150-about half the quotation of my local printer. My actual savings, however, were closer to 60 percent, since I could tailor my print run to fit my needs, instead of having to meet my printer's minimum order. What's more, since the $80 cartridge accounted for half my initial expense, and since there was still plenty of toner left over for future printouts, the cost for those runs plummeted to about one-eighth the local printer's price.

I discovered other benefits, too. Using a laser printer, I could experiment with fonts and layout in a way that would have been prohibitive if I were paying for typesetting. (For more on working with laser printers, see "Printers That Make Your Small Business Look Big!") And since I could print as large or small a run as I liked, the risk of losing money from changing letterheads (say, when I added that extra phone line) was minimized. I could even print custom letterheads for specific mailings. BUILD YOUR OWN STATIONERY

Though I used WordPerfect, any word processor with good laser-printer support and advanced text sizing and positioning capabilities should work if you want to create your own stationery. In fact, graphically based word processors-such as Word for Windows, Ami Professional, and most Macintosh programs-would make the project especially easy.

Letterhead. My first step was to decide what I wanted on my various items of stationery. Some choices-such as business name and address-were easy; others weren't. Should I, for instance, include a list of the programs in which I was proficient, to impress potential clients? Ultimately, I decided that a cleaner letterhead would be more elegant, professional, and easier to design.

When it came to the design, I had one important asset: a sister who's a professional graphic artist. (Those without professional help should check out the box "Design for Nonartists. ") She had designed my original business card. Because I knew that her design was distinctive-the card was well received by my clients-and because I felt it was important to maintain a consistent look among my business's printed materials, I decided to use the card as the basis for my letterhead.

At this point, knowing what I wanted to convey and (roughly) how I wanted to convey it, I created a template file ("lethead") with WordPerfect. I typed my name, tagline, address, and telephone number at the top, centered. My business-card design consists mostly of text, although it does use a small graphic (technically speaking, a dingbat) to separate the business name from the address. The typeface my sister used, Novarese Book, wasn't resident on my laser printer; after trial and error, I found that Palatino came close. I experimented with type sizes for each line until I came up with a design that resembled my business card but looked good on an 8.5-by-11-inch page.

Envelopes. For envelopes, I started another file, selecting the envelope paper size. I copied the name, tagline, dingbat, and address from the "lethead" file and set the top and left margins to 0.4-inch and 0.3-inch, so that the text rested flush against that corner. After some experimentation, I found that scaling down my type sizes by about 50 percent worked well for envelopes.

Mailing labels. Designing mailing labels posed a special problem. At first, I couldn't find precut labels in the size I wanted, so I created custom formats. I set up four labels on an 8.5-by-11-inch sheet of uncut label paper, printed them, and then cut out each label individually. This technique worked, but I later realized that by using an existing 3 1/2-by-4-inch label stock (Avery 5164, six-label sheets), I could eliminate the need to cut out each label. I also used WordPerfect's excellent Label macro, which automatically formats a page for any one of 19 standard label sizes. (Note that many other word processors, such as Microsoft Word, also have automatic label formatting.) IF YOU DON'T HAVE A LASER PRINTER