Letterheads in the Digital Era

In the past, part of making a company brand included a fairly core item, a letterhead. This was a design that went onto your company stationary and was used for documents and letters. The letterhead usually contained a few basic components such as the company name, contact information, and some graphics. The letterhead was useful for contracts, RFPs, and similar documents, because all the necessary contact information and company logo was right there! However, today the traditional letterhead is a much less used item. In today’s’ era of digital communication, companies no longer print their stationary to keep on hand.

However, the letterhead hasn’t disappeared all together, it now comes in varied formats and places. Below I’ve gathered a couple different ways of how to use letterheads and what makes the individual files slightly different than the others.

• Traditional Letterhead

  • Word header

  • Preferably high res JPG

    • 300 dpi is ideal

• Digital Letterhead

  • Google Sheets or Word (not intended for print)

  • Digital resolution JPG or PNG

    • 72 DPI, but when printing, use the previous letterhead file for the design or it will come out blurry and pixelated

• Presentations

  • Power Point, Google Slides, Keynote or InDesign

  • Cover slide, general slide, commonly recurring slide design*, thank you slide

    • If there is any data/information your company may use for a sales pitch, or in review sessions, it should have a special template that can be easily reused. Unless you have a dedicated presentation designer, you can’t always have a perfectly designed presentation. However, the more page layouts and styles you have created the more flexibility you will have in the future.

• Email Signatures

  • Email signatures are an easy way to keep your contact information together for easy access. They are also associated with most documents sent out of your company. The best and most reliable email signatures are text only signatures due to the different email browsers out there. Most companies prefer to include an image of their logo, or the entire signature as a well designed image, which is beautiful, as long as the person receiving it is on a browser that displays it properly. It is common for those images to come through as an image attachment at the bottom of an email and are not opened.

These are just a few simple ways to keep your brand throughout your documents both internally and externally!