| TUTORIAL

TIME NEEDED

2 hours

SKILLS

• Type tool in InDesign• Swatches palette in

InDesign

INFO

Tom Sewell is a designer and art director at Red Design. He

has worked for such clients as Emap, Sony and the fashion house Tanner Krolle. To fi nd out more information see www.red-design.co.uk.

1Collate your copy and work out what’s going to be appearing on your letterhead. The possibilities include contact details, a VAT

number and, of course, the company’s logo. For this tutorial I’m designing Red’s own stationery so I need to incorporate our branding.

Creating functional and beautiful letterheads requires a sympathetic balance of elements and a

solid knowledge of the structure of grid systems. They can have a simple, restrained beauty that any design affi cionado will enjoy, and exercise a designer’s core skills in typography, layout and colour.

Additionally, if you’re designing for a large company, you need to ensure that your letterhead is adaptable for use by offi ce staff and output from a laser printer.

In this tutorial I show you how to lay out an A4 letterhead, choose type sympathetic to a company’s logo, and select paper stocks and print techniques. I will also demonstrate how easy it is to convert your design into a Word document for internal offi ce use.

72 | December 2007

LETTERHEAD DESIGNLetterhead design is the bread and butter of any graphic designer’s work, but it’s not easy. We show you how to design a beautiful letterhead for output as conventional litho and use as a Word fi le by offi ce staff

INDESIGN • ACROBAT • WORD

Tutorial and photo by Tom Sewell

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TUTORIAL |

3Set your margins and grid. At Red we’ve worked out quite a strict grid based on seven columns and seven rows. Our left margin is

11mm, our right 17mm, bottom 16mm and top 33mm. These offset margins ensure that the layout is quite dynamic.

2 Launch InDesign and create a document with pages that are A4-sized. Of course, you could work at another size, but whatever you

produce will have to be printed on by the end user, and A4 is far and away the standard size for office printers.

5 It’s important to choose a typeface that complements

your logo. Red’s logo is in Akzidenz-Grotesk so I’m going to use the same font for my supporting type. A good option if you have a sans-serif logotype is to team it with a classic serif like Garamond.

4 Draw up your grid. Seven columns and seven rows should provide adequate structure while allowing for significant flexibility in your

design. With this many grid areas, it’s good to use quite a thin gutter. In this case I’ve decided to have 3mm.

7 Experiment with the layout

until the balance is right. Keep to the structure of your grid. You will want to give the logo priority while the contact details will probably be less important than the main content of the letter, which you should mock up with dummy text.

6A good rule of thumb when deciding type sizes is to base them on multiples of two. So if your logotype is in 14pt, set supporting type (contact details for example) in 7pt. To

keep your design really clean, try to never use more than two type sizes in one design.

December 2007 | 73

8 It’s best to work in black and white until

your layout is perfected, but once that’s done colour can add great impact. Consider using really light-coloured paper or even flooding the back with a flat colour for contrast. Your letterhead is a physical object, so print variations and make mock-ups.

9 Once you’ve chosen your colours you can

make the most of a one-colour job by using a spot colour, which will look much better than CMYK. Use a Pantone swatch book so you know for sure what spot colours look like when they are printed.

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| TUTORIAL

11Go to File>Export and save your file as a PDF. Choose the Press setting and InDesign will automatically export your file as a print-

ready PDF. It’s a good idea to add trim marks and, if you’re having anything bleeding off the edge, bleed marks. A bleed of 3mm should suffice.

10To add your chosen colour to your document, choose New Colour Swatch from the flyout on the Swatches palette. For Colour Type

choose Spot, for Colour Mode use the relevant Pantone set, then select your colour. Click OK to add it to your Swatches, then use it in your layout.

12 If you have Adobe Acrobat you can double-check that your spot colour has

been exported correctly. Open your PDF and go to Advanced>Print Production>Output Preview. This brings up a dialog that shows the colour values underneath wherever you put you cursor – a really useful feature.

74 | December 2007

If your client is a large

business, the number

of letterheads they use

could have considerable

environmental impact.

Try to source your print

through a printer with

environmental

accreditation. These are

few and far between,

but more and more

printers are recognising

the need for change.

BE GREEN

INDESIGN • ACROBAT • WORD

13Choosing the right paper stock is vital.

It’s inadvisable to go much lighter than 80gsm or much heavier than 150gsm. But think about the finish – coated or uncoated? Is it a coloured stock or even duplexed? At Red we use a stock with an uncoated front and a coated back.

14Ask your client how many

letterheads they’re going to want (500 or 1,000 is a standard number) and get a couple of printers to quote on the job. This should save the client some money – it’s not unusual for printers’ prices to differ widely for the same job.

15 To make your letterhead work in Word, you have to place the elements as images. Open your high-res PDF in Photoshop. You can set the resolution you want in the

dialog box that pops up. In this instance we want 300dpi.

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16Convert your colour image to black and

white by choosing Image>Mode>Grayscale. If your colours look a bit flat and washed out as grays, increase the contrast. Avoiding subtle grays or gradients will ensure a more faithful reproduction of your design when it is printed from an office printer.

17Use the Marquee tool to draw a horizontal strip containing one of the areas of your letterhead. Use Image/Crop, then save this area as an RGB JPEG –

Word will not recognise CMYK images. Do this for all the areas of your letterhead.

18Create a Word document. Choose File>Page Setup and select A4. Now choose Format>Document and

set the margins so they are the same as your InDesign file.

19With your text cursor at the

top left, choose Insert>Picture>From File and choose the first of your elements to insert. To insert a text field use Insert>Text Box. Your box will automatically have a black border. To get rid of this click on it, choose Format>Text Box and select No Line.

20Repeat these steps until all

the desired elements have been inserted.Word is not really built for perfect page layout so you will have to move and resize things by eye in order to get your layout to match your InDesign document.

21If you want to replicate your InDesign layout as closely as possible, print your InDesign document and keep printing your Word

document as you make changes until the printouts match.

22Now you’ve got your finished letterhead in multiple formats, why not try talking to the client and extending the project across a full

range of stationery, including address labels, envelopes, business cards, stickers and compliment slips.

I’ve talked about using

a spot colour to

enhance your printed

letterhead, but a

metallic-foil block can

also add interest and

tactility to your design.

Contact your printer for

some samples to get an

idea of what’s possible.

Alternatively, why not

highlight the logotype

on your letterhead by

using a spot varnish?

PAPER TIPS

December 2007 | 75

If you persuade your

client to let you design

address labels too,

base them on the layout

of the letterhead, use

the same spot colour,

and white the text out of

it to create contrast. You

could even custom-

make envelopes using

a sympathetically

coloured stock.

GO FURTHER

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