After two years of using personalized checks and being issued mostly the same, I’m just plain not used to seeing bank-issued drafts anymore.  As it turns out, most people - the ones I deal with at least - have similarly realized the value of using personalized checks and are taking advantage of the many benefits they offer.
As such, it leads me to ask: why are you still using boring bank checks?
You can order pretty much any check design you want, from formal-looking checks with standard prints to the fanciest most …

All of us who stopped getting our checks from the bank probably have our own reasons for ditching the standard fare in favor of personalized stuff.  Even if you’d rather opt for the typical-looking bank checks without any fancy designs, it still makes better sense not to get them from your branch.
When did you stop using bank checks?  Depending on how long you’ve stopped and how many checks you issue every month, it usually represents a large amount of savings.  In fact, getting your checks directly from the printer probably …

If you don’t care much for the novelty of personalized checks, it may be premature to abandon it entirely.  After all, personal designer checks are finding increasing use as a way to make a difference in society.
Do you have personal beliefs that you want to further?  If you want to help spread the word in living green or organic gardening, for instance, you can use personal checks as a platform to broaden people’s awareness.  For instance, I’ve seen many checks during the last year printed with reminders about ecological issues.  …

With the growing concern over the environment, it’s not unusual for more and more people to demand recycled products over ones that require using up even more of our natural resources.  If they’re going to do the job just as well, anyway, why choose any other?
When you use recycled personalized checks, you save on innumerable amounts of natural resources, from the many trees that get cut down to all the water, electricity and chemicals that are used up in order to turn timber into a fresh clean sheet of paper.  …

Bank checks are so generic in their appearance that it’s often difficult to tell one apart from the other.  With standard patterns, backgrounds and colors, you might as well use a blank sheets of white paper - there’s so little to tell them apart.
Not that it’s bad, though.  Checks are intended for economic exchanges and don’t require much else to be legal drafts.  As such, many consumers take no issue with bank checks that you can’t tell apart from each other - they do what they’re supposed to, after all.
For …