The design process has a number of generic requirements that must be fulfilled to get the best results and several questions that need to be answered, these include:

What is the printed piece supposed to say?
What information do you want to (give, enter, collect or store on the printed piece)?
Who is the intended audience? Conservative middle aged business owners, senior citizens, trendy teenagers, society ladies, up-and-coming young professionals? You need to know so you can get the best from your designers.
What information don't you need on the printed piece? What you leave off can often be as important as what you put on!  Make it easy for your customers to get in touch with you include your name, phone, fax numbers web site address email address, put this information on everything, stationery, business forms, including delivery vehicles if you have them!!  Be open, communicate.

Not everyone has 20/20 vision , so make the information is easy to read.

Choose the envelope first , make sure you can get the envelope in the paper of your choice.  There are thousands of papers available, but not all are available as envelopes.

Try to use standard  paper sizes or subdivisions of standard sizes.  These can have an impact on costs.

Keep the use of different fonts to a minimum.  Three is ok, two is even better.

Think about margins.  Letterheads and envelopes start with 1/4" on business cards try a smaller margin of 3/16".  Anything that maybe copied or faxed would benefit from having 1/2" margins so that none of the copy is cut off by the machine.

Spaced out!  think about the layout and copy writing.  White space through a job will make it easier to read and get your message across more effectively. On fill-in areas on a form think about how the information will be entered. Will it be hand written, typed, fed through a laser printer or pin feed. All of these different response methods need different considerations.