The brief

Curiosity House needed branded letterhead and document templates for everyday use: letters, reports and client documents that go out under their name.

The first version was wrong, and it was worth knowing why

We supplied designs set within documents with the margins configured. The feedback came back quickly and it was not what we wanted to hear: the client could not use them. When she maximised the margins to fit her content, the header shifted off to the left of the page.

That is a real failure, not a preference. A letterhead that only holds its shape if nobody changes anything is not a working template, it is a picture of one. The people using it are typing letters under time pressure, not managing a layout.

So we rebuilt it with the header and footer anchored independently of the body margins, so the branding stays put no matter how much or how little text goes in.

Small things that decide whether people use it

The colour had to come from the actual brand files rather than being matched by eye, because a plum that is nearly right is worse than obviously wrong. We pulled the exact value from the supplied artwork.

There was a watermark question too. An early version used an owl device, which did not work, so we went with the house mark instead. And a fold line that turned out not to be needed once we knew the letters were being sent as PDFs rather than posted.

None of that was in the original brief. It came out of showing versions and asking.

Several versions, not one

The team needed different variants for different document types rather than one template stretched across everything. Those were produced as a set so they share a single look while each one suits what it is actually for.

What it shows

Stationery looks like the simplest thing a studio does. It is often the fiddliest, because unlike a poster it has to keep working after it leaves your hands, in somebody else’s software, edited by somebody who was not in any of the design conversations.