How to Design Office Stationery
It's often said that you never get a second chance to make a first impression. When it comes to professional correspondence with your clients, customers, vendors and the media, the quality and creativity of your office stationery will speak volumes about you. Here are tips to ensure that your letters don't get tossed as junk mail.
- Difficulty:
- Moderately Easy
Instructions
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Identify your corporate image. Is it elegant? Serious? Lighthearted? Bold? Your company stationery, or letterhead, design should be consistent with the overall tone of your company and it should also lend itself easily to the design of accompanying envelopes, business cards, postcards, brochures and mailers.
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Determine the volume of letterhead you plan to use. If your primary communication with your clients is by phone or email, you're not going to need a large quantity of letterhead on hand; therefore it might be more practical for you to design a letterhead template on your computer, purchase paper at an office supply store and print out letters yourself on an as-needed basis. If you generate a lot of correspondence, however, you'll still do the formatting on your computer but will then save the file to a disk and take the disk to a local printer for quality reproduction in large quantities.
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Study the incoming correspondence you receive over the course of a week. Which letters grab your attention and which ones get immediately tossed? Make particular note of the type of paper used, the color scheme, the readability of the font, the placement of the company name and contact information and whether a logo is present.
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Decide whether your stationery will be straight text or incorporate graphics (including photographs). If you decide to include graphics but aren't artistic, you can either hire a graphic artist or peruse the Internet for free clip art images to upload to your document. Looking for photographs? Sources such as Getty Images have high-quality shots that are royalty-free.
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Select a color for your letterhead paper. What generally looks the most professional is white, cream, ecru, light grey, pale blue or pale green. These unassuming backgrounds will not only make your content easy to read but also aren't likely to clash with any borders, graphics or photographs you incorporate in your design. The appropriate weight for letterhead paper is 20 lbs. This weight of paper will slide smoothly through your printer if you are creating only a small batch at a time.
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Choose a pleasing font. While there's certainly a place for fun fonts like "Jokerman", your company letterhead isn't it. The font you select shouldn't require the services of a codebreaker to figure out what it says. Whichever font you choose should be used consistently in the layout of your pertinent information; its only variation will be the size of the text.
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Make a list of the most critical items you need to include on your letterhead. At a minimum, you should include the name of the company, address, phone number, fax number and email address. If you have a company website, you may want to include this, too. Additional elements might include the company slogan (if it has one), and a list of officers/board members if it is a philanthropic organization.
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Open a new Word document on your computer and experiment with the best placement of the elements you have listed. While a standard layout involves centering the company information at the top of the page (the company name being a larger size than the rest), you may want to break this up by only having the company name at the top and the contact information centered at the bottom. Logos generally occupy the corner slots of the page. The objective you're aiming for is balance, not clutter.
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Experiment with different colors of text to see which one looks best on the shade of paper you have chosen.
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Save your final product as a Word template if you are planning to print out letterhead as you need it. Save it as a regular Word document if you are going to be taking it to a printer for reproduction or if you are using the design as a mock-up that is subsequently going to be typeset.
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Tips & Warnings
If you incorporate a photo on your letterhead, make sure that the paper stock you use is glossy or it won't be shown in its best light.
Resist the urge to put a headshot of yourself on your letterhead unless you're in the entertainment industry and what you look like is going to be a major selling point.
Listings of corporate officers/board members are usually placed down the left side of the letterhead or at the bottom of the page in a lighter and slightly smaller font than the other elements.
Match the color of your envelopes to your letterhead shade. Use the same fonts on your envelope that you used on your stationery.
Resource sites such as Vista Print can give you creative ideas to the placement of elements and the incorporation of images.
Type a practice letter before you finalize anything so that you can see what the elements and logo look like when there is actually text on the page.
While there's no shortage of royalty-free material available on the Internet when it comes to clip art and photos, you need to remember that the same stellar image that caught your eye has probably been noticed by hundreds of others as well.
Costs will be much higher if you want your letterhead elements embossed as opposed to simply being photocopied.
Always keep a back-up copy of your letterhead master file.
Never use cheap paper to save costs.
