Having a high quality business stationery will elevate your brand identity and help you leave a long-lasting impression. Here’s how to create great custom stationery, inspired by some of the best stationery design.
In the era of startups and social media and search engines marketing deciding who survives and who doesn’t, people rarely think of print materials such as stationery and business cards as important. But, personalized stationery should be part of your branding strategy and corporate identity. Small businesses and big corporations alike will know the importance of customized items and professional stationery design to set them apart.
In this article, we’ll go through some of the basics of making creative stationery, as well as select some stationery design ideas that will inspire your own.
What exactly is stationery design?
A stationery set is all the materials that are used for hand and print communication, which helps businesses infuse all their branding assets into everyday communications. The most common stationery items are notepads, sticky notes, envelopes, letterheads, stickers, pens and pencils. Corporate stationery sometimes includes even calendars, invoice books, greeting cards and postcards.
Usually, the graphic design of stationery isn’t too complicated or saturated: it consists of key information about the company, the branding assets such as logo design, branding colors and other decorative elements. The information would be the same that is probably used in business card design, sometimes even more stripped down.
Business stationery design tends to be elegant, simple and high end, or in more creative industries, decorative and fun.
In the next chapter, we’ll look at cool business stationery examples you can learn from.
Unique stationery design concepts
Finding a template for stationery will be very easy, but you still need to customize and personalize it to suit your brand identity. Here are some amazing works from graphic designers that we compiled to get your creative juices flowing.
1. Jessica Blume
This floral designer and consultant’s stationery design perfectly encapsulates her field of work: it is a delicate, intricate and organic design. Using natural colors and recycled paper made from the by-products of crushed citrus fruits, grapes, cherries and other natural flora, the business cards, letterheads, envelopes and other stationery items are the perfect embodiment of her work.
2. Look Around
This brand’s identity is based on the knowledge that people are always in a rush and don’t take the time to look at the architecture and art around them. Hence, the design project behind these stationery items, beautiful postcards and unique envelope design, is created around the idea that their owners will be able to catch a glimpse and make be aware of the architectural beauty that he would let slip away otherwise.
3. Maldini
The branding identity for Maldini Studios created by graphic designer Jens Nilsson from Sweden is an exquisite example of high quality stationery design and branding design as a whole. Maldini Studios often uses precise lines and geometric forms to elevate the irregular detail and texture of natural materials. The stationery designer translated their style and work into the envelope, tote bag, business card and letterhead design as well—he created customized and distinctive typography, a variety of materials and a color palette that reminds us of the natural and organic style of their work.
4. Cause&Effect
When this design services studio started out, they wanted their brand communications to set the benchmark and expectations for the work they would create for their clients. Hence, the high quality and impressive look of this stationery design, and the duality of classy and composed, merged with piercing and brave aesthetic came to be. They even have their own monospace font called Moniker, whose each character was hand-drawn to create a working font.
5. Attido
This Finnish consulting, development and optimization company wanted to develop an identity that would characterize their “goal-driven and solution-centered attitude”. For that, they hired the Bond branding identity, who created this bold and utilitarian design. Needless to say, the message gets across with this efficient stationery design that infuses the branding design perfectly.
6. Lukas Diemling
Perhaps more of a portfolio than actual stationery, this graphic designer’s personal branding assets are very grunge, industrial and innovative. He uses unusual materials for packaging, as well as recycled materials for the letterhead design. Materials such as tin foil, recycled and composted paper, crepe paper and others will differ in pricing than usual paper, so if you want to create something unusual and innovative yourself, keep in mind that it comes at a heftier price.
7. MOAA Architects
A common element in architecture, interior design and real estate branding is, of course, seeing buildings. But MOAA Architects and its branding assets use a unique logo design of sketches of buildings that construct their creative monogram. The stationary design uses this logo and pattern, combined with a contemporary color scheme that freshens things up.
FAQs about stationery design
Assuming this is your first time creating stationery, here are some helpful tips to get you started:
- Templates: envelope, sticker, notepad and letterhead templates can be found easily on places such as Behance, Pinterest, Dribbble, Freepik, Stockphotos, or many others. Sometimes, you ought to pay, whereas other times graphic designers share mockups with their community.
- Size: Different stationery items have different sizes, bleed areas and safe areas. In the United States, most of the time the dimensions system followed is the one instated by ANSI (American National Standards Institute), according to which the most widely used format for general printing and letterhead stationery is the A-series.
- Format: Before sending your stationery for printing, make sure to save the files in Photoshop or Indesign in the PSD or PNG format for better quality.
We hope that this short guide on creating stationery design was helpful! For anything else, you can try out our unlimited design graphic service at a flat rate! Or check out the amazing stationery sets our graphic designers made.
