Company Letterhead

Endomatic

My family owns a small business and I've recently been tasked with designing a company letterhead. Nothing fancy really, just something to have along the top of documents and such.

I'm enthusiastic about doing it, but I'm not really sure how to approach it.

Is there a program that would serve this task well? Photoshop?
I have the design done, but I'm not sure of the best way to make it digital.

Anyone have any advice?

Ruckus

Endomatic wrote: »

My family owns a small business and I've recently been tasked with designing a company letterhead. Nothing fancy really, just something to have along the top of documents and such.

I'm enthusiastic about doing it, but I'm not really sure how to approach it.

Is there a program that would serve this task well? Photoshop?
I have the design done, but I'm not sure of the best way to make it digital.

Anyone have any advice?

Usually after you sketch out your design, we use a program like CorelDRAW to create the digital version of it (but photoshop would probably work too). Once you're happy with everything, you just save/export it as whatever format you want to use.

At the company I work for we use both TIFF and JPEG versions depending on how detailed the media will be.

supabeast

Hire a designer who knows what he or she is doing. Your letterhead is too important too look like it was thrown together in Photoshop. If your family won’t pay someone to do it right, at least download good templates and use those.

At the company I work for we use both TIFF and JPEG versions depending on how detailed the media will be.

Outputting a letterhead as a TIFF or JPEG file is a damned near criminal.

TexiKen

CorelDraw works very well for this. You can create a high quality PDF for an easy print run.

virgilsamms

Go download Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org/), a free vector graphics editor along the lines of Adobe Illustrator and CorelDraw. Ideally you want your logo in vector format which means you can resize it to any resolution and it will look great. You can also export to raster formats (jpg, png etc) if you need to.

T-bolt

I actually work for an offset printing company, and there's few things we hate more than files in CorelDraw or Photoshop (if its fully designed in PS anyway). A vector format (such as Illustrator) is best. If you're just having them printed with a laser printer though it doesn't really matter as long as you don't design in too low of a resolution.

Szechuanosaurus

Yeah, your main problem with photoshop (and any program that saves in a bitmap format) is that it will rasterize the text, so it won't output as sharp as a vector-based design program (there can also be other issues with trapping etc.). Illustrator is definitely your best option if you have access to it - either save the finished design as a PDF with fonts embedded or an EPS with fonts converted to outlines.

If the logo design allows it, create it from vectors in Illustrator as well. If not, create the image portion of the logo in photoshop and then import it into Illustrator to finsh it.

I can't speak for inkscape, but an issue I've found with opensource garphics software (such as GIMP) is that they don't support CMYK colour format or Pantone spot colours. If you are getting your letterheads printed profesionally then you'll run into problems if your graphics software can only do RGB.

flatlinegraphics

supabeast wrote: »

Hire a designer who knows what he or she is doing. Your letterhead is too important too look like it was thrown together in Photoshop. If your family won’t pay someone to do it right, at least download good templates and use those.

At the company I work for we use both TIFF and JPEG versions depending on how detailed the media will be.

Outputting a letterhead as a TIFF or JPEG file is a damned near criminal.

read the above at least twice.

other reasons for this, if you plan on getting it professionally printed, 2 color jobs can drastically cut the costs. if you don't understand the above statement, hire a designer. The cost of someone who knows what they are doing will be offset by the savings of doing it yourself. and it will look a thousand times better than slapping a jpg in the header area of a MS Word doc. your letterhead can really make the difference in a potential clients eyes between a fly by night and a professional company.

if you do it the right way, your colors will always match, the size and positioning will always be right, you won't have to answer "why does this look funny on my printer?" questions...

this all doesn't mean that you shouldn't download the trial of illustrator and go to town (open source is fine for alot of things, but professional printing and color proofing/cmyk/pantone ...... not so much).

and szechuan, ps will output vector text as of v6.5 (iirc), as long as you don't flatten the psd or rasterize the layer.

Szechuanosaurus

Yeah, but still - the golden rule I follow is always use the format that is most likely to get the job done. Illustrator EPS with text outlined is still the format most likely to not fail catastrophically at press.

Also, for short run letterheads (say, around 250 - 2500) it's probably going to be cheaper going full colour because you should be able to find a supplier who batch prints full colour letterheads, meaning the setup costs are spread across several jobs. With spot colours or non-standard paper stocks, you're typically looking at paying for the setup costs all by yourself. Spot colour printing only starts to pay off if you get into very large runs or are batching up multiple items on the same run yourself (such as different letterheads for different branches of the same office or shop, all using the same spot colours).

That said, yes a designer is a good investment. Although if you're set on the design of the logo then getting a creative designer involved is overkill - you're probably better off approaching a printer with an in-house 'designer' to recreate it as a print-ready file or hire a freelance artworker to do it.

flatlinegraphics

yeah, true. but if you get the whole thing down to two colors, when you get cards done and envelopes and tshirts and all the rest done, you don't have to redo the artwork. and i've been out of print for a year, and never really involved with quoting, so while i know digital prints have gone waaaaaay down in cost and way up in quality, i have no hard numbers anymore.

but eitherway, get everything done in vectors, hire a designer for an hour or two, and get it done right the first time.