Tips for Designing Beautiful Letterheads: “Bloody” Experience from Experts

In any business, Letterhead or letterhead plays an important role in affirming the image and brand value. A simple piece of paper is the "canvas" for the company to demonstrate professionalism and consistency in communication with customers, partners and competitors. You can send dozens of emails, hundreds of internal documents, but just one look at the Letterhead, the recipient can feel the face of your business. In this article, SaDesign will share practical experiences and important notes when designing beautiful and effective Letterhead. Let's find out!

1. Overview What is a Letterhead?

Letterhead, also known as letterhead, is a publication that includes information such as brand name, logo, address, website, email, and phone number. Letterhead will help increase the brand recognition of the business when sending letters, emails - documents, or product introduction information to customers. Therefore, the role of brand identity is key in letterhead products, demonstrating the professional attitude of the business to the viewer.

2. What is the role of Letterhead for businesses?

Using letterhead makes your brand look more professional in the eyes of your customers, which encourages them to trust your brand. Using letterhead also makes your business more reputable in the eyes of stakeholders such as partners or lending banks. Any message printed on letterhead – even a digital version – feels more formal than a regular document.

Letterheads are commonly used to present information such as:

· Transaction report       

· Internal announcement       

· Notice or contract sent to customers       

· Thank you letter       

· Invitation       

· Message from CEO or other executive       

· Notice from HR department       

3. Important notes when designing Letterhead

What to consider when designing a letterhead? These are the important things you need to know to ensure the final result of your design is professional and impressive.

Select printing paper, printing color

The thicker the paper, the more professional the design will look. The choice of color when designing a Letterhead is also very important. In terms of color, white paper is the best choice for many businesses, but you can also choose warmer tones such as cream. You also need to consider the cost and the ability to display colors to meet the needs of the business.

The rounded and corner design of letterhead is quite dry, so using watermark will be a "rescue" solution. Because this method will add fresh images and colors to the design.

Furthermore, this option supports office printing well, for example, the position of the watermark is in the middle of the page, around the letterhead border. When the watermark is too dark, the text will be blurred or too light, the text will be less attractive. You can also add texture behind the watermark to make your design more prominent.

Layout

Large businesses often use Letterheads designed from shapes or borders. The layout of the Letterhead depends a lot on the business industry. For example, in the legal or educational fields, Letterheads need to be simple and sophisticated.

Consider the recipient

What to consider when designing a Letterhead? You need to stop and consider who the recipient is. For example, a business is a law firm that needs designs that are not too colorful. Or a creative agency needs an impressive and unique letterhead design.

Unified brand identity

When a business has a common brand identity for business cards, employee cards, brochures, envelopes, etc., it is necessary to ensure that the letterhead design is consistent with those documents. This creates consistency in conveying information and building a professional image for the viewer.

Prioritization of information

Letterhead design needs to focus on information hierarchy. This means that important information should be bolded or enlarged to help viewers grasp it faster. Accordingly, on the Letterhead, the company name is the most important, followed by the address or contacts. 

4. Letterhead design process steps

In the process of designing this publication, different steps will be followed. Specifically, the operation process that SaDesign shares is as follows:

Step 1: Prioritize elements that make your brand stand out

First, we need to pay attention to highlighting the business brand. In particular, the logo and brand name will need to be placed at the top of the page or at the bottom of the document. You can also use a watermark printed in the middle of the document. This option helps increase brand recognition and is a way to maintain copyright.

Step 2: Choose style and layout

When designing a letterhead, the thing that attracts viewers is definitely the content and layout. Nowadays, businesses often use letterheads designed from shapes or borders. Avoid choosing shapes that are too colorful, making viewers less interested in the content.

In addition, each industry will correspond to a different form of letterhead design. For example, for a law firm, the letterhead will be simple and sophisticated. Advertising and media companies often use unconventional or creative layouts.

Step 3: Insert template for letterhead

The next step in designing a letterhead is to insert a template. This is a process to create a professional and consistent document. You can create a letterhead template containing your company logo, contact, background image from different design software. For example, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Microsoft Word…

Step 4: Insert logo and brand colors in letterhead

When designing a letterhead, color is very important because it will greatly influence the overall appearance of the publication. It is best for designers to choose colors that match the brand identity to create consistency. In addition, you can use other complementary colors to help highlight the content on the white space.

You should not use too many colors as it will reduce brand recognition. In addition, the quality of printed colors is also an issue to note to avoid blurred publications that reduce aesthetics.

Step 5: Add content and choose the appropriate font

Using fonts and harmonious combinations is an important point in letterhead design. Usually letterhead is quite small and difficult to see, so you need to use clear fonts with high readability. Avoid using many fonts in one design, which is confusing. Normally, you should use popular fonts such as Arial, Times news roman, Roboto, ...

Step 6: Test the letterhead after completion

At this stage, you will choose a letterhead template and start editing the text as you like. Write a sample text to test the elements on the letterhead such as logo, contact information, etc.

Next, you need to check that the logo and image appear and display correctly in the correct position and size. Then you print a test copy to check the quality of the letterhead printing to see if it is complete.

5. Collection of 5 beautiful and creative Letterhead designs

Letterhead design using beautiful border

This is a design that uses a prominent border to draw the reader's attention to the content of the paper. The border will then create a neat and scientific layout for your Letterhead.

Letterhead Template with Geometric and Background Graphics

This is a design style that is not new but always creates attractive lines and shapes. This way you will use a shape, then build it up and repeat it in different positions and angles. From here you have a Letterhead with different styles.

Use spine margins

Using spine margins helps you align your margins very precisely. This is a design template that helps you create the fastest and most suitable layouts on Letterhead.

Striking color combinations

Bright colors will help Letterhead designs always be attractive and appealing to the "audience".

Terrazzo style, focusing on simplicity

This is a style that shows maximum simplicity and neatness to attract the “reader” on the letterhead. This way will help the content of the Letterhead stand out the fastest.

Above is the sharing about Letterhead that SaDesign has compiled and shared with you. Hopefully this article helps you understand clearly about letterhead, methods, experiences and notes to design beautiful Letterhead.