Tips to design letterhead- Appy Pie

How to Design Letterhead on Your Own?


Abhinav Girdhar
By Abhinav Girdhar | Last Updated on April 15th, 2024 11:59 am | 6-min read

Yesterday I was searching for the invoice raised for my Air Conditioner. Within no time, I was able to slip out the invoice from a huge file of various important documents. Do you know how? Just by focussing on the letterhead design of the invoices. Letterhead is a kind of heading inscribed mostly at the top of the paper (letter) utilized for written communication by any business organization. It generally contains the name of the company, contact details, and an attractive logo design. To learn more about the letterhead and its importance, you can continue reading our blog. We will also help you learn how to design letterhead on your own by giving you some easy tips. Let’s dive in to know more!

The letterhead of any business document is much more than the usual heading. It consists of various components that are indeed important for promoting and marketing your brand. Let us describe some of the components that are essential for your letterhead design.
  • Name of the company: One of the basic purpose of letterhead is to immediately convey the name of your business organisation. You must ensure that it should be written at the top in clearly visible and unique font.
  • Registration number: Before starting your business, you need to acquire the registration number from various governmental departments of the country. If you add that registration number in your letterhead, then it will help you to gain trust of the people who want to connect with your brand.
  • Contact Details: Your letterhead design is of no use if you do not mention the physical address of your office (if exists), contact number, e-mail address, etc. Make sure that all these details must be clearly mentioned on letterhead.
  • Brand Logo: Logo is one of the powerful branding tools that help users in recognizing your brand easily. You must add the logo of your brand at the relevant position on your letterhead. To design letterhead for your business that can immediately attract the eyeballs of viewers, you can try Appy Pie’s Logo Maker.
  • Brand Tagline: Some businesses like Nike and McDonalds have their brand taglines. You can add the tagline to your letterhead and make it more impressive.
If you are adding the letterhead to your digital documents, you can also include the URL of your website and appropriate icons linked to your social media accounts.

What is the Importance of Good Letterhead?

Business letterhead is a ready-to-use template for all your business documents like invoices, legal notifications, agreements, and much more. It holds huge importance for your brand’s image. Let us explore a few major reasons why you need a good and creative letterhead design for your brand.
  1. Communicates Business Details: The foremost aim of the letterhead is to convey the basic details like name of the company, contact details and type of business. It communicates the same with the help of relevant text and the well-designed logo of your business. You should not ignore the power of your letterhead design and include the details in crisply organised manner.Make sure you take full advantage of your letterhead and include the details in a crisp and clear font.
  2. Acts as a Marketing Tool: Every branding material whether it is well designed brochure or visually appealing letterhead is used to market your business. Everytime you send the document with your letterhead (whether it is for public or corporate communications), it visually reminds the person on other hand about your brand and its values. Specifically, when your letterhead reached your target audience, there is huge potential of better brand recognition and repeated business prospects.Make sure you treat letterhead as the most impactful marketing tool and set the design according to your targeted demographic.
  3. Highlights Professionalism: The modern letterhead design that is stylized according to your brand, type of the business, and the best features of your business effectively highlights professionalism. Thematic and well-planned letterhead consists of certain specific colors, fonts, alignments, and much more that could easily convey the degree of professionalism of your business.Make sure your letterhead design is de-cluttered having a professional color palette along with the appropriate background and theme.
  4. Establishes Credibility: The professionally designed letterhead undoubtedly increases the authenticity and improves the credibility of your business. Imagine an invoice made on a plain sheet of paper and an invoice created on the sheet with the letterhead on top of it. Your first instinct would be to trust an invoice having a well-designed letterhead.Make sure you include the registration number in your letterhead design to establish more credibility and win the trust of your audience.
  5. Persuades Targeted Audience: The first impression is the last. The visually appealing letterhead design always helps in captivating users’ attention. When the letterhead is designed carefully, it can be used to convey the values of business-like honesty, reliability, and much more that could further persuade potential customers.Make sure you research the interests, behavior, trends, etc. related to your targeted audience and design letterhead for your business accordingly.

How to Design a Letterhead on Your Own?

There are numerous ways in which you can design letterhead for your business. However, taking care of a few major things can turn your ordinary letterhead design into the exclusive one. Let us brief you on some secret letterhead design tips for a better design.
  1. Niche and Expectations: Before designing letterhead, you must conduct detailed market research and learn about your targeted audience. Your design must-have elements that can meet the expectations of your target audience. To make sure that letterhead belongs to your niche and target audience, you can experiment with a few letterhead design ideas and then finalize the one that best caters to your needs.
  2. For instance, you wanted to create letterhead for your gaming business. Your target audience is young and energetic youth. So, you must select the vibrant colors for your letterhead that can truly represent their vibes and they can feel more connected to your brand.
  3. Layout: There are various layouts to adjust the important elements in your letterhead design. However, you can either create one of your own layouts or choose from one that is already tried and tested. You must remember that your layout can fit-in all the elements in an organized manner. You can go with a few basic designs like- arranging details hierarchically, positioning the logo at one of the corners, keeping the font of the company name bold and unique, having the light-colored plane background with dark-colored text over it, and much more.
  4. Basic Details: A well-designed letterhead can convey the basic details like the name of the company, contact details, and logo of your business. You should take care that these details are placed neatly and in an organized manner. To make sure that basic details are easily communicated, you can choose a minimalistic design and breaks up it into different sections. You can go with one of the letterhead designs where the body is kept in the center and logo at either of the sides of the body. You should choose that layout where you can arrange the details in a way that get easily absorbed by users and leaves a long last impression on them. Avoid adding too much or too little information to your design.
  5. Fonts: Font or the style in which your text is written matters a lot in the design of your letterhead. You must remember two things while choosing the font- type and size. There exist a complete family of thousands of fonts that can be varied from the size of a dot to that of a giant. It totally depends on you what size and type of font you want in your letterhead design. You can go with a basic font type like Serif for a traditional feel and Sans Serif for creating modern vibes. Make sure that font you choose matches the vibe of your brand and is consistent with fonts used in other branding tools. For font size, you can experiment in the range of 12-18 as per the text you mention in the letterhead design.
  6. Colors: Colors are used to convey the feel and vibes of your brand. They are also used to improve your brand recognition and target your potential customers’ attraction. There is no set rule to choose the particular color combination for your letterhead design. You can select any color that can truly relate to your brand. You can go with contrasting hues, monochrome tone, a combination of any three colors, complimentary or tally opposite colors for letterhead design. Make sure all colors together give the pleasing effect and creates the long-lasting impression in viewers’ mind. Use the colors responsibly and create a massive impact on your business letterhead design. You can try Appy Pie’s Color Wheel to find the perfect color combinations.
  7. Graphics: Graphics are the creatively crafted visual elements that can make or break your letterhead design. Adding graphics to your letterhead might be a bit risky if you are not aware of the impact it can create on viewers’ minds. However, if you know about the basics of designing and deploying graphics in your letterhead design, then it can do wonders for your brand’s image. You can add graphics to the header and footer of the letterhead; include some basic icons in design; add a watermark to protect and authenticate your letterhead design and can also try integrating photographs in the letterhead. Recently, geometric vectors are deployed to completely change the tone of the letterhead. You can try creating your graphics with one of the leading tools- Appy Pie Design.

Summing Up

For the best letterhead design, you must avoid doing it over the board. You should keep the design simple and minimalistic yet impressive. You can start creating the letterhead with one of the recommended tools- Appy Pie Design. It offers you a variety of templates and numerous editing tools to tweak the design of letterhead in the way you want.

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Abhinav Girdhar

Founder and CEO of Appy Pie