Castle Print & Design

Commercial printing for businesses throughout the UK & Europe.

  • E-mail
  • Facebook
  • business-cards-icons-Bonne Maman Logo
  • business-cards-icons-Ecover_logo
  • business-cards-icons-EPC_logo
  • business-cards-icons-FF-logo
  • business-cards-icons-halle-logo
  • business-cards-icons-harley
  • business-cards-icons-Hipp
  • business-cards-icons-HMV
  • business-cards-icons-jet2
  • business-cards-icons-LIB
  • business-cards-icons-Littlewoods
  • business-cards-icons-Marks__and__Spencer
  • business-cards-icons-marley
  • business-cards-icons-Mencap
  • business-cards-icons-NHS
  • business-cards-icons-RD_LOGO
  • business-cards-icons-samsung
  • business-cards-icons-Seat
  • business-cards-icons-Tesco
  • business-cards-icons-The_Open_University
  • business-cards-icons-thyssen-krupp
  • business-cards-icons-vbulletin
  • business-cards-icons-Vodafone
  • Home
  • Select A Product
    • Booklet Printing
    • Brochures & Leaflets
    • BUSINESS CARDS >> select for more options
      • Shaped Business Cards (die cut)
      • Laminated Business Cards
      • Spot Colour Business Cards
      • Spot UV Business Cards
      • Thermo Business Cards
    • Canvas Prints by Migglet
    • Continuous Stationery
    • Digital Printing Service
    • Envelope Printing
    • Folder Printing
    • Forms Printing (NCR)
    • Label / Sticker Printing
    • Letterhead Printing
    • Wedding Stationery
  • Other site info
    • About Us
    • Artwork & Design
    • Copyright Information
    • Envelope Sizes UK
    • FAQ’s
      • Artwork – FAQ’s
      • Business Cards – FAQ’s
      • General – FAQ’s
    • Glossary of Printing Terms UK
    • Legal requirements for your stationery – Page 1
      • Legal requirements for your stationery – page 2
    • Paper Sizes UK
    • Privacy
    • Setting up your office to use continuous forms
    • Sitemap
    • Stock Photos
    • Trade Printing
    • Write For Us
  • Articles & Tutorials
    • PRINT ARTICLES >>
      • 11 Benefits of Online Printing Services
      • Are Your Labels Selling Your Brand?
      • Booklet Printing & Publishing | Booklet Planning
      • Building Business Presence with Digital Printing
      • Business Brochure Printing: Picking The Perfect Paper
      • Choosing The Right Business Card Material
      • Colour Issues | Working in Spot & Process Colour
      • Digital, or Litho – How Do I Choose?
      • Fonts & Typefaces Explained
      • Free Business Cards – a bargain right?
      • How To Apply Printed Vinyl | Wet & Dry Methods
      • How to Design and Print Your Own Business Card Using ‘Pages’
      • How to Design a Photo ID Card that Reduces Card Cloning Attempts
      • How Visual Retail Merchandising Catches Your Attention in 2018
      • Logo Design
      • Print vs Digital Media – The Death of Print?
      • Print Technology
      • Proof That Print Is Not Dead | Most Consumers Still Prefer Print on Paper
      • QR Code Printing
      • Rich Black Explained | Using Rich Blacks In Your Artwork
      • Setting Up Your Office To Use Continuous Forms
      • Spot and Process Colours Explained
      • Thermo Process Explained
      • Understanding The Importance of Business Printing For Brand Promotion
      • Website Design
      • Web Design to Print Design – Making The Transition
      • What Makes A Logo Stand The Test of Time?
    • PRINT TUTORIALS >>
      • How To Design A Ghost Image
      • How To Design An A4 Folded Leaflet
      • How to Design a Business Card
      • How to design a Letterhead
      • Preparing A Print File In Adobe In-Design
      • How To Design A Pull Up Banner In Adobe InDesign
      • Text to Outlines – how to convert text into outlines
    • PHOTOSHOP HOW TO >>
      • How to Design an Alien Head Logo
      • How To Design A Pencil
      • How To Create Metal Text With Bloodstain Effect
      • How To Create Rusty Text with Holes
      • How to create Glossy Buttons
      • How to create a simple, clean content box
      • How To Preserve Spot Colours in Photoshop
      • How to create a Disney Navigation Interface Design
      • How To Design Custom Fitted Logos
      • How to create a Futuristic Logo Design
      • How to Design a Metallic Content Box
      • How to create a Clipboard Design
      • How to create an Industrial Text Effect
      • How to create an iRiver design
      • How to create a Professional Blog Template Design
      • How to create a Robot Head design
    • REVIEWS >>
      • Buying & Selling Art | ArtShowcase Review
      • Top 10 Best All In One Laser Multi-Function Printers
Home Articles & Tutorials How to design a Letterhead

September 4, 2015 By castle 1 Comment

How to design a Letterhead

In this How to Design a Letterhead tutorial you will find it is a very straightforward process however, there are a couple of issues that need addressing before you start.

How will the letterhead be printed?

Are you printing your own letterheads, or intending to send the finished artwork to a printer? If sending to a printer, will the letterhead be produced by a traditional lithographic (printing press) process or in a digital format?

It’s important you take the above into consideration otherwise it’s possible you could be wasting your time by producing artwork in the wrong format.

Digitally-produced artwork, including inkjets/lasers etc.

From an artwork point of view, we can group digitally-printed letterheads and ones you produce yourself together.

No special consideration needs to be given to graphic file formats, or the amount of colours used. Your inkjet/laser printer is basically a cut-down version of a professional digital machine so basically, what you see onscreen generally gets printed as expected. You’ll already know that many inkjets cannot print right up the the edge of the sheet, so your artwork would need to be positioned within the margins available for your particular desktop printer.

Even print resolution is not as critical when your artwork is produced digitally. When sending files away for litho printing however, you’ll often hear that files, for best results, need a print resolution of 300dpi (dots-per-square-inch). For digital work this can often be much lower however, I wouldn’t recommend going as low as 72dpi which will look fine onscreen but will not look as sharp when printed.

Litho printing – spot colour & 4 colour process (CMYK)

We’re now in a different ball game as we need to provide artwork in the correct format, or the results may not be to your liking, or what you expected.

Spot Colours

If you’re designing a 2 colour job, e.g. dark blue & red logo, with the same dark blue for the text then don’t bother with programs such as Microsoft Word, or Adobe Photoshop. Word is fine for digital output and Photoshop is fine for 4 colour (CMYK) work.

For spot colours, the artwork you send in needs a software program to ‘separate’ the 2 colours onto 2 individual ‘plates’. (Plates are individually mounted onto a printing press).

Programs such as QuarkXpress, Adobe In-Design & Illustrator can create and separate spot colours correctly. So when asked by your printer for an EPS files (Encapsulated Postscript), he is referring to a file that can be output by one of the above programs.

For more information on working in spot colours please see here:
Spot & Process colour explained

For a fuller explanation also covering some typical everyday problems when working with colour, please see the article here:
Colour issues when working in Spot & Process colours

4 colour printing, or CMYK

The same tutorial above can be used to learn about 4 colour printing. For the layman, 4 colour work is generally just as easy as producing work for digital output. However, try not to use any imagery under 300dpi, as the high resolution output from film & plate imagesetters will show up any discrepencies in the resolution of your artwork.

For low-volume print runs generally speaking, spot colour work is cheaper than 4 colour and if colour accuracy is important, then spot colours could prove essential.

If you’re in any doubt on which process to choose, talk it through with your printer who will advise, based on the quantities you require, the most cost-effective route to take.

How to design a letterhead

Ok, the following is based on a simple letterhead design. If you are using Microsoft Word then I would suggest you keep all artwork within your printer margins, and do not have any artwork extending over the edge of the page.

Time needed: 30 minutes.

  1. Start by setting your workspace to A4

    If you’re intending to use bleeds, (see below) then, depending on what software package you are using, you may need to set the workspace to oversize A4 (SRA4), which measures 225mm x 320mm.

    A4 size is 210mm wide x 297mm deep.

  2. Rulers

    Turn on rulers in your design package (often Ctrl. R), and set the top left hand corner to: x = 0, y = 0. This will help you to position the margin guides.

    How to design a letterhead fig. 1

  3. Margins

    There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to margins. Many people will just stick 10mm or 15mm all round. I prefer the bottom margin to be 7mm, especially if there are 2 or 3 lines of text, as I think it looks better.

    Layout: there are numerous types of layout for a letterhead design. In this instance we’re using a simple centred layout, which is very easy to create.

    How to design a letterhead fig. 2

    Ok, we’ve positioned the logo 10mm from the top and the address details 7mm from the bottom of the sheet. (Guides not shown for clarity).

    You may need to position a vertical guideline 105mm from the left edge to give you a centre line to align the logo correctly.

    Before we go any further, you may have heard the term ‘bleeds’ when reading about print files. The term is easy to understand and shouldn’t cause you any problems.

  4. Bleeds

    Basically, a bleed is artwork that goes over the edge of the printed sheet.

    If your design needs to have a bleed then it’s important to allow 3mm overlap (see image A below).

    As the letterhead will be printed on oversize material (SRA4), this gives the guillotine operator a chance to cut into the artwork and produce a good finished letterhead. (see image B below).

  5. Letterhead A

    How to design a letterhead fig. 3

  6. Letterhead B (after bleeds have been trimmed off)

    How to design a letterhead fig. 4

    Why do we need a bleed?
    If the artwork ended at the edge of the sheet and the guillotine was only 0.5mm off, then we could end up with a thin white strip down one edge of the sheet, which looks unsightly.

    Also, if there is a large stack of paper on the press, with the best will in the world there will be the odd sheet that doesn’t get fed through the press 100% accurately so if a bleed hasn’t been put in place this could cause issues.

    Extending the artwork over the edge of the sheet allows for a little leeway when it comes to the time for trimming. If you’ve set your workspace for A4 and intend to use bleeds then, depending on what software package you are using you may need to set the workspace to oversize A4 (SRA4), which measures 225mm x 320mm.

  7. Back to our letterhead (Crop Marks)

    We are now ready to add ‘crop marks’, (if sending your file to a litho printer).

    Crop marks, or registration marks use a special colour (registration) that appear on all plates, enabling the press operator to accurately line up the plates by overlaying one colour plate over another.


    How to design a letterhead fig. 7

    If you were adding the crop marks manually then you’d first need to select the line tool, and then the colour ‘registration‘ as indicated by the gunsight icon in the above screenshot.

    Most professional layout programs however will automatically add crop marks (selectable from the menu).

  8. Crop Marks without Bleeds

    How to design a letterhead fig. 5

  9. Crop Marks with Bleeds

    How to design a letterhead fig. 6

  10. Convert Fonts to Outlines

    One final task is to Convert Fonts to Outlines. If you’re not sure how to do this, just check out this easy-to-follow tutorial: Converting Text to Outlines.

    If you’re using a program such as Adobe In-Design, or Illustrator it is recommended you convert all text to outlines. This effectively removes the need for you to supply any fonts you’ve used.

    Apart from the legal aspect, if you’ve just spent a lot of money on some real nice designer fonts, you won’t be wanting to send them out for free!

    Converting fonts to outlines effectively makes the text non-editable as all the characters in the typeface become single small graphics. Before you proceed to convert to outlines, it might be worth saving the file under a different name as a backup, because once outlines have been created, the file no longer becomes editable.

    With all text now converted we then proceed to make a pdf of the file.

  11. Fonts

    If possible, try not to use more than 2 fonts in your design. Often, using just one font will do the trick. For instance, if your company name is Acme Autos and you have this in a bold sans-serif font such as Ariel Bold, then try using Ariel light, or regular for all the other info on the letterhead.

    If your headline (company name) is in a bold serif font, such as Times Roman Bold, then if going for a traditional look use a lighter weight of Times for the other info, or even try using a light sans serif font to compliment the headline.

    More on – choosing a suitable font for your project.

    We hope the above has proved to be useful.

Related Posts

  • Letterhead Printing
  • How to design a Ghost Image
  • How to Design a Business Card

Filed Under: Articles & Tutorials Tagged With: design a letterhead, how to design a letterhead, letterhead design tutorial

Comments

  1. sylvia says

    March 15, 2016 at 11:37 am

    That was quite helpful and pls add more illustrations in the explanation.

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Useful Site Links

Paper Sizes UK
Envelope Sizes UK
Glossary of Print Terms UK
Spot & Process Colours Explained
Legal Requirements - Stationery
Copyright Information
Trade Printing Service

Search the Site

Copyright © 2021 Castle Print & Design - all rights reserved

Bleeds explained

Basically, a bleed is artwork that goes over the edge of the printed sheet.

If your design needs to have a bleed then it’s important to allow 3mm overlap (see image A below). As the letterhead will be printed on oversize material (SRA4), this gives the guillotine operator a chance to cut into the artwork and produce a good finished letterhead. (see image B below).

A
How to design a letterhead fig. 3
B
How to design a letterhead fig. 4

Why do we need a bleed?

If the artwork ended at the edge of the sheet and the guillotine cut was only 0.5mm out, then we could end up with an unsightly thin white strip down one edge of the sheet, which is not ideal.

Also, if there is a large stack of paper on the press, with the best will in the world there will be the odd sheet that doesn’t get fed through the press 100% accurately so if a bleed hasn’t been put in place this could cause issues.

Extending the artwork over the edge of the sheet allows for a little leeway when it comes to the time for trimming.

If you’ve set your workspace for A4 and intend to use bleeds then, depending on what software package you are using you may need to set the workspace to oversize A4 (SRA4), which measures 225mm x 320mm.

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.Ok