How to make a gift voucher to print

A gift voucher is one of the templates built into Publish by Zaweba. It measures 210 by 99 mm, a long slim shape, so you only need to edit the wording, add a picture if you like and print it. The app is free for Windows, runs offline and needs no account.

Vouchers come up for small shops, salons, cafes and anyone making a homemade present. They need to look like they mean it, so a clean design with clear details matters more than decoration.

What to put on a voucher

Most vouchers carry the same few things: who it's for, what it's worth or what it's for, who it's from, an expiry date if there is one, and how to redeem it. For a business, a reference number and the shop's contact details help too.

Open the gift voucher template and type over each piece of sample text. Keep the value or the treat in the biggest type, because that's what the person will look at first. Put the small print at the bottom in a quieter size.

Giving it the right look

Pictures can be inserted, pasted or dragged in, then cropped inside the frame by double-clicking. Picture shapes such as an ellipse or a rounded rectangle soften a photo, and the border and shadow follow the shape. If you want a gentler background picture, recolour it with washout so the text on top stays readable.

For a decorative heading, Insert > WordArt offers eight styles. Elegant italic or classic serif suits a spa or a restaurant; retro or neon suits something more playful. It's still real text, so it can be edited later.

Shapes with two-colour gradient fills make a good band behind the value. Named colours in the document palette let you match the voucher to your shop's other material, and changing one updates everywhere it's used.

Numbering vouchers

If you sell vouchers and want each one to carry its own number, use mail merge. Put the numbers in a column of a CSV file, open Tools > Mail merge, click where the number should go and click the column. Preview record by record and then export one merged PDF or print merged. You'll have a stack of vouchers, each with a different number, and a list to check against when they come back.

Printing

Print through the Windows print dialog. Publish prints at actual size and centred, and scales down only if the paper is smaller than the page. Because the voucher is smaller than A4, it will sit in the middle of an A4 sheet, ready to trim. Good card makes it feel more like a gift.

For a print run at a shop, export a print-ready PDF. It includes the bleed set in the document, crop marks, trim and bleed boxes, embedded fonts and full-resolution pictures. Colour is RGB only.

To send a voucher by e-mail instead, export the page as a JPEG or PNG, or make a web PDF, which reduces pictures to 150 dpi to keep the file small.

Save your design as an .ozp file. Next time someone asks for a voucher, you change the name and the value and it's done in a minute.