So let’s talk paper. When we started producing our planner inserts back in October of 2014, I wanted to use paper that was a nice weight, held the vibrant colors of our designs well, had little bleed through, was affordable for our customers and wouldn’t bulk up a planner too much. I did a lot of testing with different papers and weights and found the one that fit our needs the best, but as time and use and customer feedback came in I decided to revisit our paper.

We had a number of customers that liked to use fountain pens in their planners and they were getting some bleed through; I also noticed some bleed through when I used bold or “dense” style stamps on my pages. I wanted our inserts to be better than that, so I met with our printer and we went through a bunch of samples, trying to find that happy medium. Each set of inserts has FORTY-NINE pages plus the divider; that’s a lot of pages and if we made the paper too thick your planner wouldn’t have room for anything else. The problem is that unless you go really thick there will always be some bleed through. Another option is whether to use coated or uncoated paper; coated paper can be a bit more glossy and won’t bleed through. However you have the issue of ink not drying very quickly and then smearing, which is not what you want to have happen!

The final result is a set of heavyweight, uncoated pages that I think have a wonderful, luxurious feel to them. Heavy ink or really dense, thick stamps may still cause a touch of bleed through but it’s minimal. You can see in the picture above how the new paper makes our inserts almost double the thickness from our previous inserts. I’m thrilled that we were able to make our inserts even better, listen to our customers feedback and keep the cost the same!

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Christine Everett