The Business Stationery Suite: What to Include and Why It Still Matters
Stationery feels like a legacy purchase until you need it. A quotation, a contract, an invoice, a formal letter to a bank or a government department — these still travel on paper or as PDFs formatted like paper, and how they look affects how the sender is read.
The set is small, and getting it right once means it works for years. For teams coordinating overlapping creative work, a useful operational reference is this guide, which covers time allocation and hand-offs.
The core set
Letterhead. The foundation. Used for quotations, contracts, formal correspondence, and anything that needs to look official.
Second sheet. A continuation page with lighter branding — usually just a small logo and page number. Multi-page letters printed entirely on full letterhead look wrong, and they waste ink.
Compliment slip. Traditionally 210 × 99 mm, a third of A4. Accompanies documents and small deliveries with a short handwritten note. Cheap, and it does more relationship work than its cost suggests. More practical design references are available in the Adobe design resources.
Business card. Covered separately — see our guide to business card design.
Envelopes. DL for letters, C4 for unfolded A4. Printed with the return address and logo.
Worth adding
Presentation folder. Holds proposals and documents, usually with a die-cut business card slot. Meaningful for businesses that hand over physical proposals.
Invoice and quotation templates. Digital, matching the letterhead. These are sent far more often than letters and are frequently the least designed thing a company produces.
Report and proposal template. For businesses that deliver documents as their product.
Email signature. The highest-frequency branded item you own, and the one most often left to individuals to improvise.
With compliments cards, thank-you cards, or note cards for businesses where personal follow-up matters.
Letterhead specification
The mistake is designing the letterhead as a composition rather than as a container for text you have not written yet.
Leave room for content. Header and footer should occupy no more than 20 percent of the page combined. A design that fills a third of the sheet leaves too little for a real letter.
Set margins that a word processor can match. Most letterheads are used as templates in Word or Google Docs, and if the printed design's clear areas do not correspond to achievable margins, text lands on the artwork.
Provide two versions: - Print version — press-ready with bleed, for professional printing - Digital version — a Word or Google Docs template with the design in the header and footer, for everyday use
The second one is what actually gets used. Supplying only a print-ready PDF guarantees that someone recreates an approximation in Word, and that approximation becomes your de facto letterhead.
Include what is legally required. In the UAE, business correspondence commonly carries the trade licence number and registered address. Confirm your obligations and build them into the footer rather than adding them ad hoc.
Print specification
| Item | Stock | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Letterhead | 100–120 gsm | Must feed through office printers and photocopiers |
| Second sheet | 100–120 gsm | Same stock as letterhead |
| Compliment slip | 120–170 gsm | Slightly heavier feels better in hand |
| Envelope | 100–120 gsm | Check printer's compatible stock list |
| Folder | 300–350 gsm | Requires a die; setup cost applies |
Letterhead stock is the constraint that catches people. It has to run through whatever office equipment your team uses. Heavy or textured stock jams laser printers and can scorch. If in doubt, test a small quantity before committing to a run.
Full-bleed backgrounds on letterhead are risky for the same reason — office printers cannot print to the edge, so a design with a coloured background will only ever work when professionally printed, and your team will print in the office.
Standard preparation applies otherwise: 3 mm bleed, CMYK with Pantone references, 300 dpi, fonts outlined. See our guide to print-ready artwork.
The email signature
Worth its own section because it is used hundreds of times more often than letterhead and is usually the most neglected item.
Keep it HTML-light. Complex signatures break across email clients. Simple layout, web-safe fonts, minimal images.
Small logo, hosted reliably. Large embedded images get stripped or show as attachments.
Essential detail only: name, title, company, phone, email, website. Not five social icons, a legal disclaimer, an award badge, and an environmental message.
Provide it as a template, with a one-page instruction for installing it in your email client. Left to themselves, ten people produce ten signatures.
Test it in Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail, and on mobile before distributing.
Quantity
Order conservatively. Details change — an address, a phone number, a licence number, a person's role — and a box of 2,000 obsolete letterheads is a familiar sight in storerooms.
Envelopes and letterhead in modest quantities, reordered as needed. The per-unit saving on a large run rarely compensates for the reprint.
The digital-first reality
Most of what a business sends is now a PDF, not a printed sheet. This does not make stationery irrelevant — it changes which item matters.
The templates people actually use daily are the quotation, the invoice, and the proposal. If your budget for a stationery set is limited, spend it on those and on the email signature, and print the letterhead in a small quantity for the occasions that genuinely need paper.
Собираем комплекты деловой документации — печатные и цифровые версии сразу. Дизайн фирменной продукции. .