Case studies

Some letterhead design solutions

Your letterhead is the workhorse of your stationery. While a business card will be distributed widely, your letterhead will be in front of potential clients for a longer time and has less of a ‘throwaway factor’ than cards. There’s a few issues you need to think about when creating a letterhead design – number of colors (affects the price of reproduction), bleed vs. standard (which is not only a cost consideration, but may limit the printer you’ll eventually hire to print your material). There’s also the issue of paper stock – quality vs. price – that you’ll have to deal with once the letterhead design process is complete. Here’s a few letterhead design case studies from The Logo Factory.

Kokokabana Mexican Grill letterhead & cards. Due to the four color process nature of the logo, the business cards and letterheads of this project had the freedom of full-color, but required a restrained design sense in order to maximize the visual impact of the main logo and character. Our designers utilized some of the design elements of the logo in order to tie everything together.

Foamation. The simplicity of the Foamation logo was carried over into the letterhead design. With such vibrant colors, the graphic stands out, is clearly identifiable – everything the clients asked for.

Random Task. When it comes to letterhead design, color – while secondary to the actual design – is critical for subsequent applications such as printing in the ‘real world’. The Random Task logo and letterhead design project is a perfect example why color should be very carefully selected during initial phases. The client was originally interested in the old Microsoft Internet Blue, a color that was prevalent in the company’s old websites. Alas, that color cannot be reproduced in traditional printing (it is an RGB color without any four color process or spot color equivalents). Take a look at the image above – a side-by-side comparison of the web safe blue requested, and a compromise blue that will reproduce across all mediums including printing. Bottom line – just because your letterhead looks ’snazzy’ on a monitor does not mean that it will work when you take it to a printer.

Once we had settled on an appropriate color, the ‘cyclone’ aspect of the logo was carried over into the company’s stationery & letterhead design, and the muted color captured the qualities the client desired.

Tanning Factory. Sometimes design simplicity is called for. Case in point – the stationery layout for this tanning salon project. The letterhead is stripped down to the bare necessities – company logo, and contact info – with the addition of a few design elements and a watermark (when using a watermark it’s critical to make sure that it’s adequately ’screened back’ – light enough – otherwise it will conflict with any correspondence that’s written on the sheet. The business card, also shown, maintained this theme.

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