Stationery that has to survive your own office printer
Letterheads, continuation sheets and compliment slips are the one category of corporate print that gets printed twice. We print the design, and then your office laser printer prints a letter on top of it. Most of the problems with corporate stationery come from ignoring that second pass at the specification stage.
A laser printer fuses toner with heat and pressure, somewhere around 180 to 200 degrees. Whatever we put on the sheet has to go through that without melting, lifting or curling. Get this right and a letterhead lasts years in a stationery cupboard. Get it wrong and someone in accounts is picking flakes of laminate out of a fuser roller.
The specification, item by item
Paper weight
Between 100 and 120gsm is the working range for letterheads. Below 100gsm the sheet feels thin and shows the print on the reverse. Above about 120gsm many office printers begin to struggle with the paper path, and duplex units struggle sooner than single-sided ones. Compliment slips are a different case: they are not run through a printer, so 120 to 170gsm is fine and feels better in the hand.
Check the machine your team actually has before specifying anything heavier. The manufacturer's stated maximum for the main tray is often lower than for the manual feed, and nobody hand-feeds letterhead one sheet at a time for long.
Surface
Uncoated is the default and the safe answer. Toner bonds to it well, pens write on it, and it takes a stamp. Coated stock looks glossier and holds printed colour better, but toner sits on the coating rather than keying into fibre, and on some coated papers it will scuff off with a fingernail. If a coated look is required, ask for a laser-guaranteed grade and test it in the actual office machine before ordering thousands.
Laminate is simply not an option on anything going back through a printer. It softens under the fuser. This catches people who want a soft-touch feel on a letterhead, and the honest answer is to put that finish on the folder or the card instead.
Ink coverage and where it sits
Keep heavy solid colour away from the area where the letter text will land. Two reasons: toner does not sit reliably on top of a dense printed area, and heavy coverage on one side of a light sheet encourages curl, which is what makes a stack misfeed. A coloured band down one edge or across the foot is fine. A full-bleed colour background across the whole sheet is asking for trouble.
Full bleed itself is worth questioning. Bleed means printing oversize and trimming, which costs more than printing within a margin on a pre-cut sheet. On a letterhead nobody notices the difference, and the money is better spent on the paper.
Designing the template around the print
Give whoever writes the letters a matching digital template with the printed elements removed and the margins already set to clear them. Without it, someone will build their own in a word processor, the address block will overlap the printed footer, and every letter that leaves the company will look slightly wrong.
Set the top margin below the printed masthead with a few millimetres of air, not touching it. Set the bottom margin above the footer band. Mark the window position if envelopes with windows are in use, because the recipient address has to fall inside it when the sheet is folded in thirds, and a template that ignores this produces letters that need refolding by hand.
The continuation sheet is the one everybody forgets. It carries a smaller mark rather than the full masthead, no footer block, and the same margins as page one so paragraphs do not jump. Order them in a ratio to the letterheads based on how long your letters actually run - a third as many is typical, and for a firm producing long reports it is closer to one for one.
Quantities and the shelf-life problem
Stationery is the classic case of ordering too many because the unit price looked good. Printed letterhead has a real shelf life, and it is not the paper that expires. It is the details on it.
- An office move invalidates every sheet in the cupboard
- A change of phone number or a new domain does the same
- Company registration details, where they are required on stationery, change with the entity
- A rebrand takes out the lot, however carefully the logo was drawn
- Paper yellows slightly over years in a warm store, so the sheet from the bottom of a five-year stack does not match a fresh one
A two-year supply is usually the sensible ceiling, and one year is safer for a business that is growing or moving. The difference in unit price between 2000 and 5000 sheets is real but smaller than the cost of binning 3000. We cover the arithmetic of this in storing and reordering printed stock.
Envelopes, and matching them properly
Envelopes are printed on a different machine, on different paper, often from a different mill. Expect a slight difference in white against the letterhead, and either accept it or specify both from the same paper range so they are at least designed to sit together.
For a corporate set, DL envelopes take the letterhead folded in three and C4 takes it flat, which matters for anything with an original signature or a document that should not be creased. Window or plain is a workflow decision rather than a design one: windows save addressing but demand that every template puts the address in the right place, and one department that ignores the template makes the window useless.
Peel and seal costs slightly more than gummed and saves real time in a post room handling volume. Printing on the flap rather than the face keeps the front clean for the address and any franking.
Ordering a stationery set
Order the set together rather than piece by piece. Printing letterheads, continuation sheets, compliment slips and envelopes in one go means the same paper batch, the same colour build and one delivery, and it removes the mismatch that appears when items are ordered months apart.
Send us the brand guidelines along with the artwork, since guidelines usually specify colour references and clear space that we should be following rather than guessing at. Where the guidelines and the supplied file disagree, we will flag it rather than pick one. Our print spec sheet article covers how to turn guidelines into instructions a supplier can act on.
We produce a paper dummy on the actual stock before a first run, so the office can feed a blank sheet through their own printer and confirm it behaves. That test costs nothing and it is the one step that prevents the expensive version of this problem. The custom and online printing page lists the stationery stocks we hold, and print specs for corporate stationery has the file requirements.
Tell us what printer your office uses when you order, and we will spec the paper to suit it.
