If you’ve been married, you probably know how excruciatingly difficult it can be to get addresses together for your guests. And if you are a calligrapher, you likely know how painful it can be to try to work with a list that hasn’t been formatted in a way that you can easily work with. So how do you marry the two {wedding pun intended!} and avoid the stress?
Be sure your clients know how you prefer to receive their list before they start working on them…i.e. immediately when they book with you! There will of course be many clients that have already started collecting their addresses, but it’s still a good idea to let them know right from the get-go how you request that lists be formatted for submission on their order.
For us this means a link to “List/Name Format” on our site immediately when they hover over “Calligraphy” – so before they even get to the page to book envelope calligraphy with us – in addition to a link in the confirmation email that they receive from us once they book their order.
The link takes them to this page where they can download either a Word document or an Excel document {which ultimately we would Mail Merge into a Word document}. The important thing with each is that if they send a Word document that it is numbered, so you can easily get a correct count on the order, and in the Excel document that you have separate columns for each component of the address so that you can easily manipulate your Mail Merge to look like an address block {tip: you can even center the address blocks in the Word doc before printing to help you gauge your centering – once you are able to center the top line, you can better see how the next lines should line up underneath}.
If you are looking for envelope calligraphy, feel free to find more details & book directly through our website here!
Calligraphers, feel free to leave your questions on other items in the comments below and we will try to include them in an upcoming post.
xo
Alyssa
p.s. if you are looking for help with styling your photos for social media like the one seen in this post, be sure to check out Cool Photo School!