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|TUTORIAL

TIME NEEDED

2 hours

SKILLS

Type tool in InDesign

Swatches palette inInDesign

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 find out moreinformation see www.

red-design.co.uk.

1Collate your copy and work out whats going to be appearing on

your letterhead. The possibilities include contact details, a VAT

number and, of course, the companys logo. For this tutorial Im

designing Reds 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

afficionado will enjoy, and exercise a designers core

skills in typography, layout and colour.Additionally, if youre designing for a large company,

you need to ensure that your letterhead is adaptable for

use by office 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 companys logo,

and select paper stocks and print techniques. I will also

demonstrate how easy it is to convert your design into a

Worddocument for internal office use.

72|December 2007

LETTERHEAD DESIGNLetterhead design is the bread and butter of any graphic designers work, but its not easy. We show youhow to design a beautiful letterhead for output as conventional litho and use as a Wordfile by office staff

INDESIGN ACROBAT WORD

Tutorial and photo by Tom Sewell

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TUTORIAL |

3Set your margins and grid. At Red weve 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.

2Launch 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.

5Its important to choose a

typeface that complements

your logo. Reds logo is in

Akzidenz-Grotesk so Im 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.

4Draw 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, its good to use quite a thin gutter. In

this case Ive decided to have 3mm.

7Experiment

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

Its best to work in

black and white untilyour layout is perfected,

but once thats 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.

9Once youve 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. Its a good idea to add trim marks and, if youre 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.

12If you haveAdobe Acrobatyou 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 usecould 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.

Its 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 theyre going

to want (500 or 1,000 is a

standard number) and geta couple of printers to

quote on the job. This

should save the client

some money its not

unusual for printers

prices to differ widely for

the same job.

15To 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 andwhite 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

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

18Create a Worddocument. 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, chooseInsert>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 allthe desired elements

have been inserted.

Wordis 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 InDesignlayout as closely as possible,print your InDesign document and keep printing your Word

document as you make changes until the printouts match.

22Now youve 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.

Ive talked about using

a spot colour to

enhance your printed

letterhead, but ametallic-foil block can

also add interest and

tactility to your design.

Contact your printer for

some samples to get an

idea of whats 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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