Learn How to Design Your Own Letterhead

Learn How to Design Your Own Letterhead
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Why Use a Letterhead?

Using the right style of letterhead can help to convey your own personal brand on any correspondence that is sent out. Different styles can give a formal or casual feel to the reader and add a little insight as to who the sender of the letter is. For instance, when sending a business based letter the right type of letterhead can show the company logo and contact information. When sending a more personal letter, a creative letterhead can give the body of information a little flair to break up white space.

Whether you use a letterhead for personal or business use does not matter, but what does matter to any type of correspondence you send, is how the letterhead will look on the page. Here we go over how you can design your own letterhead for any style letter use that you may need.

Business Use Letterheads

When creating a letterhead style for business use , it is important to keep the type of business in mind. For example, you wouldn’t want a bland typeface for a design company and leave out the company logo, no more than you would use a creative typeface for a legal firm letterhead. Always keep the type of business that the company does in mind. If there is a brand logo that can be used at the top of the letterhead, then do so. An example of using a logo in place of a company name as part of the letterhead can be seen in the image at the upper left. In the image at the lower right, is an example of a business letterhead that does not included a company logo. Click on each image to get a closer look at the letterhead style.

Whether a logo is used or not, when you design your own letterhead for business use there are elements of

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information that need to be included. This information includes mailing address, e-mail address and phone number. Making sure that the reader has three areas of contact information is a benefit to the receiver of a business letter. The other areas where this information should be shown is in the addressed envelope and in the signature end of the letter.

Personal Use Letterheads

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Personal use letterheads have much more room for implementing creative style. A personal letterhead can contain just artwork, or it can include your name and contact information. How this type of letterhead is designed is completely up to the person who will be using it.

Two types of personal use letterheads can be seen to the right and the left. One the left, is a personal use letterhead design that only uses artwork to showcase the body of the letter, while the personal use example on the right shows how a name and contact information can work for this type of letterhead.

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Whether your needs are for personal or business use there are free templates that can be used for the design challenged, if you find that creating your own style a bit harder to do than you imagined, see our article on Resources for Free Letterhead Templates .

References

Design Rules for Letterheads by Roger Walton, Collins; illustrated edition 2004

Images created and provided by writer