New Personalized Stationery! WooHoo!

I'm just now putting the final touches on a new video to demonstrate the many intricacies of engraving and thermographic printing on Crane stationery. In the very near future, I'll post it to the web so you all can see it. For the video, I needed to follow a piece of stationery from beginning to end, and because I just happened to be in the market for some new Crane stationery, the answer became clear!


I've designed hundreds of pieces of stationery for members of the media, for TV shows, magazine layouts, celebrities and movies. But designing one's own, what with all those options from which to chose, can be daunting. For some reason, I recalled some stationery I had designed several years ago for Gordon Elliot, who at the time was hosting a show called The Genuine Article on the Fine Living Channel and doing a piece on Crane stationery. I really liked that particular design and so decided to adopt it for my own.
Here is the finished product:





I selected Gordon's typeface: Chevalier – a font I have used several times to create stationery for men. It just seems to make a fairly manly statement. Here's a close-up look

72 dpi just doesn't do the fine-line detail of this font justice, so you'll just have to take my word for it. Chevalier was designed by Emil Alfred Neukomm of the Swiss design firm Hass in 1946. Chevalier is a set of shaded capitals and figures that Linotype deems “ideal for business cards and classical letterheads.” I don't disagree, but I like its presentation on a No. 3 correspondence card with Regent Blue ink with a hand-brushed Regent Blue border. I had the envelopes lined in Regent as well.

If you think Chevalier might be for you, but want to take it for a test drive before committing to personalized stationery, have a look at these thank-you notes that come pre-engraved.

Now it's time to stop typing and start writing.