Personalised Stationery Blog – Writing about writing

When did you last write a letter?

I mean picking up a pen and putting ink to paper

In this world of instant electronic communications, sharing socially at the click of the button or moreover the tap of a touchscreen on your smartphone, you’d think the old school pen and ink method of communication would be dead.

What is it about receiving a personal letter through the post? Does it carry more charisma than an email. Is it because the sender took time and effort to consider their words; the sentiment that they carry may be cherished for years to come. Is there a greater gravitas in the thought that goes into a letter over an electronic message.

Electronic communications can be transient as times, whereas a letter has a permanence, a more soulful connection between two people and the thought of ripping the paper and throwing it in the bin is like tearing at your heart strings.

Debretts sum it up quite well:
“Writing by hand focuses the mind. There is no delete button, no backspace, so words must be considered and chosen carefully before being committed to paper, making their meaning all the more succinct. Handwritten notes are both personal and permanent; a love letter is worth a thousand texts.”

So isn’t about time you took some time and trouble to write someone a letter. It may enrich their life, and yours too.

Back in Black (on Black)

You could go for coloured ink. You could choose white foil. You could even have gold foil. What’s the classiest way to make a really subtle stand-out design? In our opinion that would probably be black ink, on black board with a contrasting front.

With our ultra heavy cards this is completely achievable and the look is stunningly understated. I’m sure we’re are the only people in the UK offering double thickness 600gsm cards with both the front and back colour being at your selection from our range.

This means that it is very unlikely anyone will have even seen a card like this, let alone in the same colour combination and definitely not with your choice of font and layout too. Exclusivity never came so easily.

Design your own fabulous

Here at our Studio in The Old Smithy we frequently talk to Customers who think they can’t possibly design their own stationery. “I’m not very good at the internet!”, they tell us over our website live-chat service, without a hint of irony.

The simple, delightful truth however, is that it’s so much easier than you might think.

You’ll have a picture in your head of how you want your stationery to look – we tend to call this your “fabulous“. You just need to take a little time to find and personalise the right template for you.

What really sets our design tool apart from the rest is flexiility. You can adjust the four essentials for each bit of your design: font, text size, text alignment and ink colour. This alone gives you incredible flexibility in terms of layout.

When you also add-in our unique library of exclusive motifs & glyphs – with the same flexibility in most cases – you can really start cooking on gas. We also offer a wide range of special characters tjust to be sure you can use the font you really want.

Frankly, no other tool lets you do that, so rest assured you’ve made a good choice by coming to us!

Woah, HEAVY!

You’ve seen that the world and his wife now offers 250, 300 or even 350gsm cards, right? You might have seen a few retailers offering 500 or possibly even 540gsm cards.

The thing that people are really looking for (I think) when they talk about weight, is actually thickness or rigidity. That being the case, we may have just the right product for the weight-conscious stationery addict in the form of our Ultra range.

Weighing in at a whopping 600gsm (as a MINIMUM) and, plainly put, being a multi-laminate of our standard high quality English and Italian 300gsm boards these beauties are something really special.

Twice, or even three times the thickness of anything else we offer and with incredible rigidity thanks to the laminated structure, you will make a lasting impression with these in your wallet.

What’s more, we’ve taken our usual approach to flexibility – essentially: Trev reckons that if we can offer a product, we should. So you’ll find that you can choose any of our standard colours as the front or the back laminate. In any combination. . . .

To recap, Ultra is our exclusive 600+gsm stock with a different colour face to the front and back (or the same, if that’s your thing), single or double sided printing, we can even foil it if you like it that way. Just think: blue cards with a white foiled design to the front and a grey ink on orange to the reverse. Or how about white with gold foil on the front and black on black reverse (yes we’ve tried it, yes it looks awesome).

I’m pretty sure you won’t find a comparable product even close to this price-point anywhere else.

Oh and another thing, you’ll notice that we don’t offer our usual 2 working-day priority dispatch on these cards. That’s because we individually hand make them in our studio. Just for you. To order.

Remember those invites Joe in credit risk had done for his birthday, the ones everyone loved at the time?

Thought not.