04 / Everyday materials

Business cards, menus and social templates that match your site, proofed on the real paper.

Business card design, restaurant menu design and social media templates for small businesses in Austin. Every piece comes out of the same identity system as your logo and your website, so the card in a customer's wallet and the post on their phone look like one company made them.

website
wordmark
letterhead
menu
guidelines
business card

Three kinds of piece, one system behind them.

The usual mess we are asked to fix: a card from an online template, a menu someone set in Word, and an Instagram grid in a third colour scheme. None of them are wrong on their own. Together they look like three businesses.

Letterpress business cards fanned beside a matching letterhead and envelope — Fig. 01Cards on 600 gsm cotton with a blind impression, beside the letterhead and a #10 envelope from the same set.

01 · Stationery

Business cards and stationery

$380–850per set, design and print files

A set is a business card, a letterhead and an envelope. The low end of the band is one card layout for one person on a standard stock. The high end is a card with a reverse side, names for up to six staff, letterhead in Word and PDF, and a stock that needs letterpress or foil set-up files.

Business card design is where a cheap job shows first. A 14 pt coated card bends in a wallet. We usually spec 16 pt uncoated or a 600 gsm cotton for letterpress, and we tell you which one your budget suits before you fall in love with the expensive one.

Proofed on the actual stock at our table before anything goes to press
Print-ready PDF/X-4 with 0.125 in bleed and crop marks
Editable letterhead template so the office stops pasting the logo into blank documents

Set specification
Card size	3.5 × 2 in, square corners
Letterhead	US Letter, PDF and .docx
Envelope	#10 window or plain
Names on cards	1–6

A printed restaurant menu and folded leaflets on a café table — Fig. 02Single-sheet menu on 120 lb uncoated cover with two tri-fold leaflets. Headings in the client's slate, prices set in tabular figures.

02 · Menus and flyers

Menus, flyers and leaflets

$240–520per piece, print PDF plus editable file

A piece is one designed item: a one-page flyer, a two-sided menu, a tri-fold leaflet. A single-side flyer with copy you supply sits at the bottom of the band. A double-sided restaurant menu with sixty items, allergen marks and a price column sits near the top.

Restaurant menu design has one job most menus fail at: you should find the thing you want in under ten seconds. We set sections in a strict grid, align prices on the right in tabular numerals and drop the dollar signs. Menus change, so you get an editable version in Affinity Publisher, InDesign or Canva, your choice, and you never call us to change the price of a latte.

Print-ready PDF with bleed, plus the editable source you keep
A web version of the menu that loads on a phone, not a scanned PDF
Fold mock-up on the real paper so you can check the panel order by hand

Piece specification
Common sizes	Letter, Legal, 11 × 17 in, A5
Folds	None, half, tri-fold, gate
Editable in	Affinity, InDesign or Canva
Bleed	0.125 in

A phone showing a grid of social posts built from one set of templates — Fig. 03Twelve templates in use: four post layouts, four story layouts, four announcement frames. One accent, used once per post.

03 · Social

Social templates, set of 12

$640–1,100per set of 12 editable templates

Social media templates for small business are only useful if the person posting at 7 a.m. can fill one in on a phone in two minutes. So we build twelve, not forty. Square and portrait posts, stories, an offer frame, an event frame, a quote frame and a plain photo frame with your mark in the corner.

Templates come in Canva or Figma, set up with locked layers for the mark and the grid and unlocked boxes for text and photos. The upper end of the band adds motion versions of the story frames and a short written guide on photo crops. We do not post for you and we do not manage accounts. Other people do that well.

Built from your identity: same type pairing, same palette, same margins
Locked brand layers so nobody stretches the logo
Handed over in your own Canva or Figma team, not ours

Set specification
Post sizes	1080 × 1080, 1080 × 1350
Story size	1080 × 1920
Templates	12
Tools	Canva or Figma

Paper stocks we actually specify.

We print proofs on the real stock before you sign off. Screens lie about colour, and they lie worse about paper. A slate blue on coated stock reads crisp. On uncoated cotton it drinks in and goes a shade darker, so we adjust the ink value for the paper rather than hoping.

Stocks by use, weights in US and metric
Stock	Weight	Good for	Watch out for
Mohawk Superfine Eggshell	130 lb cover / 352 gsm	Business cards, menus that get handled	Deep solids look slightly soft; we lift the contrast
Crane Lettra cotton	220 lb / 600 gsm	Letterpress cards with a blind impression	Fine type under 6 pt fills in; minimum size enforced
Uncoated text	70–80 lb text / 104–118 gsm	Letterhead that goes through an office laser printer	Heavier stock jams cheap printers; we test yours
Matte coated cover	100–120 lb / 270–325 gsm	Flyers, leaflets, photo-heavy menus	Cracks on the fold unless scored; we spec scoring
Synthetic waterproof	10–14 mil	Patio menus, bar menus, anything near water	Costs about twice as much per sheet; worth it outdoors

File preparation

What the printer gets, and what you keep.

You get the source files. All of them. We do not hold a menu hostage either.

Most reprint problems we see start with a file, not a press. A logo pasted in as a 72 dpi PNG. Black text set in four-colour rich black so it registers fuzzy. No bleed, so a white hairline shows along one edge of every card. We prepare files so a printer in Austin, or anywhere else, can run them without a phone call.

Every print job ships as a PDF/X-4 with 0.125 in bleed, crop marks, fonts embedded and images at 300 ppi at final size. Body type is set in 100% K. Spot colours are named where the job uses them, and a CMYK build is supplied alongside for digital presses. We send the files to the printer you choose, or we recommend one we have proofed with before; you pay the printer directly and we take no margin on print.

The source goes to you at handover: the layout file, the font licence notes, the linked images and an exported PNG of each piece for quick sharing. If you change printers in two years, nothing has to be rebuilt.

Stationery, menus and templates are cheapest when they follow an identity we have already drawn. If you come with a logo from somewhere else, we ask for the vector source first. If nobody can find it, redrawing it is a separate line under logo and wordmark, and we tell you before we start.

Process, for print

A print job takes two to three weeks.

01Content and stockDays 1–3
You send the text, prices and photos. We pick two stocks and order samples.
02LayoutDays 4–8
One layout direction, set in your identity, shown as a PDF and a desk print.
03Two revision roundsDays 9–13
Named in writing before work starts. Changes are listed, not guessed.
04Proof and pressDays 14–18
A hard proof on the real stock, your sign-off, then files to the printer.

The full four-step method across sites, identity and print is on how a project runs.

Questions people ask before ordering print.

Does the price include printing?

No. The bands cover design, proofing and file preparation. Printing is billed by the printer at their price. For orientation, 500 cards on Mohawk Superfine typically print for less than the design of them; letterpress on cotton costs noticeably more and we tell you the printer's figure before you commit.

Can you just do the menu without a whole identity?

Yes, if you have a logo in vector form and a sense of your colours. We will build the menu around what you have. If what you have is a JPEG of a sign, read the identity page first; a menu cannot fix a mark that falls apart at small sizes.

Who is this not for?

Anyone who needs 300 social posts designed a month, or retail packaging with dielines. Those are different trades. We make the base set of everyday pieces and hand over templates so your team keeps going without us.

What if I want a third round of changes?

Two rounds are included. A third round usually means the brief was wrong, so we fix the brief first and quote any extra round in writing. Typo fixes after sign-off are not a round; we correct those.

Will the templates work if we change the menu every week?

That is what the editable version is for. Text boxes flow, price columns hold alignment, and the layout survives an item or two more per section. Add a whole new section and you may want us back for an hour.

Bring the card you hand out now.

Set the number of pieces in the estimator and see a band before you call. Websites and logo work are on websites and identity.

Estimate a project