Nothing says I love you more than handing your customer or client a wonderfully tactile and beautifully designed piece of print. The upsurge in customer targetted publications in the past five years or so is keeping the print industry buoyant. Paper can position your comms just as strategically as the logo, fonts or photography and recent years have seen an increase in the use of uncoated paper.

Find yourself at the end of the till in Marks and Spencers and try to restrain yourself from adding their latest food mag to an already overflowing shopping bag. Designers love offset paper, photographers not so much, although paper stocks have developed so much in recent years that the merest lick of a coating brings great photography to life.

Waitrose has raised their already high stakes in customer comms this Christmas with a voucher offering printed on uncoated stock; that showcases great photography and pleasing design.  All shot against the darkest charcoal background the colours of golden roasties, turkey and creamy cheeses sing from the page. Uncoated is the perfect paper for high saturation print and there are some great papers out there now that have a lick-coating that will allay the fears of any photographers.

I don’t know whether it’s a design thing, but I find myself heavily biased towards matt and uncoated stocks, they scream out ‘pick me up’, and I invariably do.