It is always nice to have your own personalized stationery. Corporations always have their own customized stationery as part of their strategy in marketing their products and services. You do not have to own a corporation just to have your own stationery, and it is always great to put your own personal touch, so to speak, on the letters and notes that you write.

Normally, you would need to place an order from a stationery printer so that you could have your own personalized stationery. But stationery printers always take volume orders; now, what would you do with pads and pads of stationery unless you write often? Volume orders may not be worth the expense for you.

After all, you can make your own custom-made stationery. You do not even need to learn sophisticated photo-editing software or desktop publishing software to come up with them. Your word processor is often enough. Here is how to make your very own customized stationery using Microsoft Word 2007.

The Paper for Your Personalized Stationery

The first choice you would have to make in creating your own stationery is the paper you would print it on. Book paper quality is often sufficient for anyone’s writing needs, but you are free to choose whatever kind of paper you feel comfortable writing on. If you are going to print a background image to decorate your stationery, you may want to select paper that will readily absorb ink from printer ink cartridge.

The size of the paper is another matter you would have to decide upon. If your paper is not standard size, such as letter or legal, just make sure that the page dimensions of your stationery file are the same as the paper you would print on. On MS Word ribbon, you can adjust the size of the paper under the Page Layout tab.

You should also pick out a good color for your paper. White is good enough if you will be using a background image for your stationery. But if you are using colored paper, just make sure that the color will not be too dark. Or else, your letters and notes would be hard to read.

Background and Border Art

You can have fun in decorating your personalized stationery. With MS Word, you can put borders on your stationery, customize headers and footers, and put background images.

To put borders on your stationery, just go to the Page Layout tab and select Page Borders on the Page Background box. On the dialog box that would pop up, you would be able to choose how thick your borders would be, what dimensions it would take, what sides of your stationery will have borders and if you want artwork or not.

To customize your headers and footers – usually done when creating letterheads – you would need to go to the Insert tab on the ribbon and select the header and footer box. This will deactivate the main body of your file, thus allowing you to type whatever you want on the header and the footer of the page. You can put a personal logo if you want or your contact details.

To put background colors, you would need to go back to the page Background box on the Page Layout tab on the ribbon and then select page color. When the dialog box pops up, you can select a color from among those displayed. If you are not satisfied with the shades presented to you, you can select the More Colors option so you can mix the colors exactly how you want them.

If you want a background image, click on the fill effects and choose from preset patterns and textures. Or you can import any picture that you want as your background image. You may want to edit the picture you select beforehand using a photo-editing software to lessen the picture’s intensity and make whatever fonts you use readable.

Choosing Fonts for Your Personalized Stationery

Once you are done with sizing and decorating your customized stationery, what comes next is choosing fonts if you are not going to write your notes and letters longhand. Again, readability is what is important here. You can choose whatever font that you want as long as its size is big enough to read.

Choosing the color of your fonts can be tricky as well. Select colors that will float or contrast against the background color or image that you will use. Once again, what color you will use will affect the readability of your letters on your personalized stationery.

When you are done with all these, what you do next is to save your personalized stationery as a new file. So, whenever you want to use your new stationery, just open this file, save it as another file, and then write or print away.

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