Commercial print · 4 min read
Business stationery: letterheads, cards and envelopes
Business stationery is the least glamorous print a company buys and the most frequently handled. A letterhead goes out with contracts, a card is passed across a table, an envelope arrives before anything else does. Small specification mistakes here are seen by more people than almost any other print job.
Uncoated, and why it is not a downgrade
Stationery is printed on uncoated stock, and that is deliberate rather than economical. Uncoated paper takes pen ink, runs through an office printer without smearing, and feels like a document rather than a brochure. A glossy letterhead is unusable the moment someone signs it.
It changes how colour behaves. Uncoated paper absorbs more ink, so colours print softer and slightly darker than the same file on coated stock. Approve stationery colour on the actual uncoated stock, never against a coated proof, or the brand colour will look wrong on the one item people see most.
Letterheads have to survive your own printer
A letterhead is a blank the company prints onto afterwards. That means heavy ink coverage in the wrong place will be printed over, and any area the office laser printer cannot reach is wasted. Most desktop printers cannot print to the edge at all.
So keep the design out of the typing area, keep full-bleed colour to a minimum, and test the finished letterhead through the actual office printer before signing off the run. A letterhead that jams or smears in the machine it was made for is a complete loss however good it looks.
Business cards: weight is the whole impression
A card is judged in the hand within a second, and the judgement is almost entirely about thickness and edge. Ordinary card feels disposable; a heavier stock feels like a company that pays attention. It is the cheapest upgrade in the entire stationery set.
Beyond weight, the options are edge and finish: a soft-touch lamination, a spot UV on the mark, foiling, or coloured edge painting on a duplexed card. Each is a real step up in cost, and each is genuinely noticed, which is unusual in print.
Envelopes, and the window problem
Envelopes come in standard sizes for a reason: they have to fit the folded letterhead and they have to satisfy the postal service. Fix the envelope and the fold together, because a letterhead that needs an awkward fold to fit is a daily irritation for whoever posts it.
If you use window envelopes, the address block on the letterhead must align with the window after folding, with tolerance for the fold being slightly off. Test this physically with a printed letter and a real envelope. It is the single most common stationery error and it is invisible on screen.
Keeping the set consistent
Stationery is usually ordered in pieces over time: cards when someone joins, letterheads when they run out, envelopes when someone notices. Printed at different times against different references, the brand colour drifts until the set no longer matches itself.
Fix the colour as a Pantone reference rather than a CMYK build, keep it in one place, and give it to whoever prints any part of the set. Better still, order the set together against one approved sample, which is both cheaper per unit and the only reliable way to keep the pieces identical.
Ordering it properly
Specify the stock and weight for each item, the Pantone references, the fold and envelope pairing, and the quantity per piece. Then approve one physical sample of each before the full run, on the real stock, not a digital proof.
We print letterheads, cards, envelopes and folders in Lahore alongside the packaging work, which means the whole set runs against a single colour reference instead of three suppliers each interpreting the brand separately.
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