Letter, card, and envelope are one drawing before they are three objects. Decide the shared left rail and the thin rule first, and echo one vermilion tick from that rail on every piece. The mark, when it is allowed in, sits inside the field. It does not invent a new margin for the card, or drift into a corner of the envelope because that piece was drawn on another afternoon.
Designed apart, each object looks tidy and the suite does not. The letter is centred, the card is flush right, and the envelope starts wherever the address landed. Nothing is shared but the paper size. The plate puts all three on one rail. If a piece must slide sideways before the edges agree, the files do not share that rail.
How to check it
- Lay the letter, the card, and the envelope in a column. The left rule should be one straight line through all three. Nudging a printout to fake that line means the files disagree.
- Find the tick on each piece. Same length, same colour, same distance from the rail. A second tick, or a tick in another colour, is a second system.
- Add the mark only after the rail and the rule hold. It sits in the field, clear of the rail, and it does not replace either of them.
.suite {
--rail: 0.75in;
border-left: 2px solid #16150f;
padding-left: var(--rail);
}
.piece {
margin-top: 0.75rem;
padding-top: 0.5rem;
border-top: 1px solid #16150f;
}
.tick {
display: block;
width: 0.6rem;
height: 2px;
margin-left: calc(var(--rail) * -1);
background: #c0300f;
}