Find Articles in:
All
Business
Reference
Technology
News
Lifestyle

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

 

BNET TalkbackShare your ideas and expertise on this topic

The following tags are supported in BNET comments:
<b></b> <i></i> <u></u> <pre></pre>

Leave a Reply

  1. You are currently a guest | Login?
advertisement
CIO SessionsVision Series on ZDNet

See and hear what CIOs the world over thinks about the business of technology and how it's changing the way we live and work.

Go
advertisement
  • Click Here
  • Click Here
advertisement

Content provided in partnership with Thompson Gale