Need 50 slick-looking sheets of letterhead [OT]

This is slightly off-topic.

I live in London. Can you people here help me with getting a small volume of preprinted stationery. I want to get some A4 paper with coloured letterhead so that some letters look very formal as if they come from a small to medium organisiation. There is no faking or false status involved.

I need 50 "first" pages which would have a logo and various preprinted items on the page and then 100 "second pages" which would come from the same paper stock and which may or may not have preprinted items.

What is the cheapest or best way to get this?

The letters are going to be sent to people who are used to receiving such corespondence so letterheads produced by a doemstic laserjet (with its slightly patchy shading of blocks of colour) is not going to look right.

The volumes I need seem a bit too low to trouble a commercial printer for.

Do you think I get the results I want by making a design on my own PC and taking it to a pro copy shop that has something like colour laser printing. I have heard of Kinko but never used them.

What other options should I consider?

Jim

Reply to
Jim
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A commercial printer should do any volume, but the costs per ream will be prohibitive, especially for four- or six-colour work.

Colour laser is (pretty much) colour laser.

Depending on exactly what you need on first and continuation pages, it might be possible (and a lot cheaper) to get pages colour printed with the logo, which will do for both first and continuation pages, then overprint the sender's address on the first pages using a template set up in the word processor. This technique is used by quite a lot of large organisations, councils etc.

Otherwise there are the generic printed papers from Papers Direct etc, that you overprint with your own address.

Owain

Reply to
Owain

No, very off-topic

Reply to
Newshound

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Reply to
The Medway Handyman

Yes You could try using Dreamweaver which can be downloaded free... Cash

Reply to
cashbuster

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HAND, HORSE.

Reply to
Morris Finsbury

Since you don't provide a reply email address it's difficult to respond to you without spamming the newsgroup. My company does undertake small design and print jobs in high quality colour output. I'd consider the work that you mention.

You aren't completely clear about what sort of job you want, i.e. do you want someone to design the logo layout the pages etc or just to print off something that you have designed yourself? Also are you likely to want more in the future or is this it, 150 pages total?

If you want to talk about it, try contacting me at sales(at)malloc(dot)co(dot)uk. Don't respond directly to this post because all replies go straight into the bin. Be aware, that it doesn't really matter how few pages you have done, the labour cost remains about the same for the work and *that* is the most important cost in the process. That, and VAT which can be more than the profit element of doing the job for such small jobs.

Reply to
Steve Firth

Err Dreamweaver isn't appropriate at all. It's a web design package.

Reply to
Steve Firth

I'm surprised you think this is too short a run for a commercial printer, because generally speaking commercial printers use Laserjet and Inkjet printers for short runs. But the difference is being a commercial printer having the advantage of bulk buying and wholesale prices on ink cartridges, unlike the average home user will tend to use proper inks and be geared up to produce the best quality results.

You could do this on a domestic printer but generally in my experience anything apart from branded ink cartridges will simply not produce adequate quality and is it really worth spending £50+ on either a new printer or a full set of cartridges simply to print 50 letterheads?

There is no reason why you couldn't do this design on your own computer. If you have nothing else available Microsoft Word has enough basic layout and vector drawing facilities to design and produce a professional looking letterhead. In fact at a push MS Word can be used as a DTP program because if you use the Text boxes and graphic alignment and text wrap settings and know how to alter the default borders it puts on things one can produce very professional results. The other thing is MSWord has letter head Wizards which can help you put something together which looks reasonably professional without needing a degree in Graphic Design. And of course most commercial printers can read MS Word files.

Saying that there can be pitfalls using MS Word particularly if you do anything non standard such as use unusual fonts or special effects since not all versions of MS Word are the same. E.g Apple Macs have a version which is nothing like the PC version.

I do a bit of graphic design myself mainly adverts for Glossy Magazines and night club flyers and generally tend to output artwork to be sent to the publisher or printer as a 300 ppi 24bit bitmap in Adobe Acrobat PDF format, or even in some cases as a large JPEG, because a bitmap format is only 100% reliable way of ensuring all the fonts and any special effects used such as drop shadows can be interpreted as intended on any computer with any platform.

Reply to
Amanda Angelika

Why? That's a Web design Package :) Actually he'd probably be better off with MS Office Word for designing a letterhead, in fact it even has Wizards for this job, so even someone totally inexperienced with design could create a professional looking letterhead :)

Reply to
Amanda Angelika

BTW bearing in mind one or two other people are touting for business in this thread LOL if you can find a suitable local printer I could knock up the design for you including a logo supplied in Adobe Acrobat PDF or any suitable format ready to be taken to your printer for £30 and I accept Paypal :)

Reply to
Amanda Angelika

Have you tried VistaPrint? They normally do free short runs of stationery as a marketing ploy....I know they'll do you 250 business cards for free, so they might do letterheads too.....

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Reply to
Swampy Bogtrotter

How on earth would that help?....Did you read the OP's question at all?

Reply to
Swampy Bogtrotter

DIY - Word, Publisher, Quark, Indesign etc etc whatever programme you have. Lotsa people do it, who needs a local printer nowadays when you have one on your desktop? If your desktop printer isn't very good a new one would be cheaper than employing a live one. It'd pay for itself in one job.

cheers

Jacob

Reply to
owdman

You could design the letterhead on your PC and put it on a CDRom...Take that CDRom to your local branch of Staples, and they'll do however many full colour prints of it as you require using an extremely high quality colour laser printer......

I've used this service on a number of occasions, and it's very good and affordable too.....

Reply to
Swampy Bogtrotter

And I'd say that's very reasonable and I wouldn't set finger to mouse for that little.

Reply to
Steve Firth

Indeed, who needs a local printer when they have access to a packet of crayons and a ream of paper.

It may, but experience shows that mostly it won't.

I wouldn't denigrate the skills of the OP they may be perfectly capable of creating a brilliant professional job, but somehow I get the feeling they wouldn't be asking across a slew of newsgroups for assistance if they were capable of doing the job by themselves.

Of the offers so far Amanda's seems very reasonable.

Reply to
Steve Firth

Reply to
vulgarandmischevious

Why on earth would a commercial printer use an inkjet?

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

"vulgarandmischevious" wrote

They'd have a job to do that, if you gave them a temporary (throw-away) email address!

Reply to
Tim

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