A notebook is the most reliable corporate gift there is, for one unglamorous reason: it gets carried. The decisions that matter are all made before printing, and most of them are about the cover.
The cover is the product
Interiors are ruled pages. What separates a notebook that gets used from one that stays in a drawer is whose name is on the front. A company logo puts the book in every meeting; an individual name makes it the recipient’s rather than stock. Both are worth doing; only one of them needs a name list.
Covers are printed edge to edge and laminated, which is what lets them survive a bag for a year.
Dated or undated
A dated diary is the better gift — it feels finished and the recipient does not have to fill in a year. An undated one is the better bulk purchase, because leftover stock is still usable next January instead of being written off.
The practical rule: new-year gifting wants dated, and organisations issuing across a full session or hiring year want undated. See diaries and composition notebooks.
Artwork
- Logos print best from vector artwork or a transparent PNG at least 1000px across. A logo copied from a website will look visibly rough at cover size.
- Photographs should be the original file, not a shared copy — the compression that makes a photo easy to send is what makes it print badly.
- Brand colours should be sent as codes. Screen and print do not match automatically.
Putting your logo on a gift covers this in more detail.
Individual names
Entirely possible, and worth it for class sets and welcome kits. It changes the pricing, because each name is its own print setup rather than one repeated across the run — that difference belongs in your budget from the start rather than being discovered at quotation.
Send names as a spreadsheet, one row per book. Every reprint we have done on a named order traces back to a name transcribed by hand out of a message thread.
Timing the new-year order
Dated diaries are the most deadline-bound product in the catalogue. Production fills through November and December, and a diary delivered in February is worth a fraction of one delivered in December. Order in October if the books are for January issue.
Paper and binding
Interiors are ruled as standard, on stock chosen so that a ballpoint does not show through to the reverse — the detail nobody asks about at ordering and everybody notices in week two. The binding is sewn, which lets the book open flat on a desk; that is what stops pages tearing loose over a year of being folded back. If you need a specific page count, margin or a blank interior for drawing, say so at enquiry rather than assuming: the cover is customisable on every option, the interior is not.