Stationery is where a company designs its letterhead and its business cards. You place blocks on a page: the logo, the company name, the address, a phone, an email, a QR code, a colour band. Every block shows the company's own facts, so nothing is typed twice and nothing goes stale.
Where it lives
Open Books Settings, then the Branding section. The Stationery card sits beside the look card (logo, colour, closing note), because the two are what a design is made of: the logo and colour come from the look card, the name, address, phone, email, website and EIN from Company information under the Company section. Change a fact there and every design follows.
There is a second door: the Letterhead & cards button on the Documents tab lands on the same card.
Starting a design
Click New design and pick a starter. Each starter is already drawn with your company's facts, so you see your own name and address in the picture before you choose. There are letterheads (Letter and A4) and business cards, plus a blank page of each kind. The Contractor letterhead and card already carry your license numbers, in the header, along the foot of the page and on the back of the card: add the licenses under Company information, mark them for stationery, and pick the starter.
The designer
- Drag a block to move it. Pull a corner or edge to resize it. The arrow keys nudge the selected block (hold Shift for bigger steps) and Delete removes it.
- Snap keeps blocks on a fine grid and lines an edge up with another block or the centre of the page. A red line appears when an edge snaps.
- Add a block from the left: company facts, decoration (your own words, a QR code, a line, a colour band) and, on a card, the person's name, title and contact details.
- The selected block's settings appear on the left: position and size in inches, font size, bold, alignment, colour. "Brand colour" is the colour picked under Branding; "Brand colour, legible" is the same colour darkened only as far as it needs to be read on white paper.
- A block whose fact is missing shows a dashed hint such as Needs a phone. It prints nothing until the fact is filled in under Company information, so a letterhead never prints "EIN" with nothing after it.
- Words on a fact block: Company's prints what is saved under Company information, live. My own prints words you type for this design only, for instance a direct line on a card or a mailing address that differs from the registered one. The company's record is never changed. Phone numbers print as (702) 555-0100, or with +1 when the saved number carries the country code.
The typeface
Every design has one typeface, chosen at the top of the designer, and every text block uses it. Letterheads start in Montserrat and business cards in Lato, the warm sans most printed cards use; the list runs from clean sans faces (Jost, Inter, Source Sans, Raleway) to serifs (Lora, Merriweather, Playfair Display, Libre Baskerville, Cormorant Garamond) and a plain System face. The paper prints with the same face the designer shows.
Both sides of a card are yours. Most firms put the name and contact on the front and the logo, a QR code or a line about the business on the back; leaving the back empty prints a blank back, which is also common. Switch sides with Front and Back at the top of the designer.
Your list of designs
The Stationery card lists your designs in the order you keep them: the arrows move a design up or down, and the list pages ten at a time (change the count at the bottom). Click a design's thumbnail, or its eye, to see the paper as it prints.
Business cards
A card is 3.5 by 2 inches and has a front and a back. The dashed red line is the safe area: keep type inside it and the print shop's cutter cannot clip it. Bleed marks adds an eighth of an inch of artwork around the card and crop marks outside it, the way a print shop asks.
The card is designed once and printed for anyone. Type the person's name, title, phone and email in Print this card for; they are filled in at print time and are never stored on the design.
License numbers
If the company holds licenses or registrations (a contractor's license, a broker's number), list them under Company on Books Settings. The designer then offers a Licenses block that prints every license marked for stationery, one per line or all on one; the same numbers print under the company's address on invoices, estimates and purchase orders when you mark them for those papers.
Pictures
A Picture block holds an image you upload: a portrait on a realtor's card, an award seal on a letterhead, a product shot on the back of a card. Add it from the decoration group, then choose a PNG, JPG or WebP file up to 8 MB in the block's settings. The picture is kept with the design and saved with it; the company's logo stays its own block, from the look card.
Fill crops the picture to cover the whole block, which is what a portrait wants; Fit shows the whole picture inside the block, which is what a seal wants. Corners are square, softly rounded, or a circle (make the block square for a true circle). Sits and Crops toward choose which part of a cropped picture stays in view, so a portrait keeps the face.
QR codes
A QR block can open the company website, start an email or a call, save a contact card into the scanner's phone (the company, or on a business card the person), or carry words or a link you type.
Viewing and printing
Each design on the card has a View button: the paper as it prints, in a window, with Print and PDF right there and Design to open the designer. Print opens the design at its exact size in a print window. PDF opens a file in a new tab whose page is exactly the physical size, ready for a print shop. Save the design first; the PDF is one click after that.
The paper prints from what is saved. A new or removed logo is saved the moment it lands, so it never waits on the Save button. If you have changed the colour or the closing note on the look card and not saved yet, View, Print and PDF ask to save your look first, so the paper always matches the preview.
The default letterhead
The default is a letterhead thing: it is the letterhead kBooks reaches for on its own, so business cards have no default (nothing prints a card without you). The first letterhead you save becomes the company's default, marked with a star. The default letterhead heads every customer statement and the cover sheet of the year-end package. Click the star on another letterhead to make it the default instead, or click the star on the default to have none; statements then go back to the plain branded header.
Access
Anyone who can open the books can view and print the designs. Saving, deleting and choosing the default need edit access to the books.