Letterheads are important for businesses, and they’re thankfully only needed once, then used for the foreseeable future on all correspondence through templates. Nevertheless, it’s important to get your letterhead design right the first time so that all of those letters and documents officially sent out by your company bear a good representation. Here are a few quick tips on how to create a custom letterhead:
First and foremost, your letterhead should be fully branded and be in line with your company’s values. For larger companies, branding is something that is commonly documented and standardised, but for small businesses, you may want to give extra consideration to getting it right – especially if it’s your first time designing a letterhead.
Specifically, make sure to include your company logo, name of the business, address and contact information, website and/or social media accounts, and perhaps a tagline. The style, colour palette, font, and other details should make it crystal clear that it’s your business, the same as what the recipient might find by walking by your office or visiting your website.
There’s no need to overcomplicate a letterhead. The design should be clean, concise, and kept as simple as possible. Clutter just feels out of place, and the content is what your reader should be focused on. Nevertheless, the letterhead should clearly indicate who your business is and represent it well through branding.
The letterhead itself should use simple fonts, display prominently on (but not dominate) the document, and make your company look professional.
A letterhead is normally used for, well, a traditional letter; this means that your paper format should be what’s commonly used for letters in your business, which is A4 or US Letter size if you mail to US clients, for example.
The lovely thing about a letterhead is that you can scale it for different paper formats, if necessary, and adapt it to things like business cards, engineering plans, etc. Naturally, this may require modifying the content of the letterhead so that it’s appropriate for the document format. For traditional letters, scaling it appropriately and creating various templates for common document sizes is fairly easy once you’ve got your preferred letterhead designed.
There’s a myriad of high-quality design suites available today, but it’s still important to choose one that’s reputable and user-friendly. Canva, for example, leans towards user-friendliness (and it’s an Australian business) and has pretty decent AI integrations to help you with letterheads and more.
More traditional programs, such as Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop, as well as Microsoft Word, can all be relied upon for just about any design you want.
Nowadays, a letterhead might be used completely digitally, perhaps saved and sent as a PDF or other common format. In many cases, you’ll likely need to print out the letterhead and send it by mail, so it needs to look good in real life and not just on the screen.
The colour and detail you might see on a digital file may not translate well to print format, even if there’s nothing inherently wrong with the printer or colour selection. Having a few samples printed out can help you verify that everything’s to your satisfaction, such as placement of margins, appearance of colours, crispness of any graphics (e.g. company logo) and text, and so on.
A bonus tip in terms of design is to try and use vector graphics whenever possible as opposed to raster. Vector tends to scale well, whereas raster can “blow up” and lead to pixellation, looking potentially awful when the file is originally small and expanded out to fit a larger space. Many software suites can be used to design vector graphics logos.
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