Letterhead Design: What to Include (and What to Leave Off)

A letterhead does one job: identify who a letter is from, at a glance, without competing with the actual content of the letter itself. It's easy to over-design — adding a busy background, oversized graphics, or every contact detail a business has — and end up with something that looks cluttered rather than professional. The best letterheads say who you are cleanly in the header and margins, then stay out of the way.

What actually belongs on a letterhead

• Your logo, sized to be recognisable without dominating the page.
• Business name, and a tagline only if it's genuinely short and adds real identification value.
• Core contact details — address, phone, email, and website, kept concise.
• Enough clear white space at the top for the letterhead to feel like a header, not a full-page design.

What to leave off

Registration numbers, full banking details, an exhaustive list of every service offered, or a large decorative background image all tend to clutter a letterhead rather than strengthen it — most of these belong in a footer at most (small, unobtrusive) rather than competing for attention near the top of the page. A letterhead that tries to communicate everything about a business ends up communicating none of it clearly, since the eye has too much to process before it even reaches the actual letter content.

Logo placement and sizing

Left-aligned or centred logo placement are both standard and professional; a right-aligned logo works too but is less common and can feel slightly unconventional to some readers, which is worth knowing if consistency with typical business correspondence matters. Sizing the logo to be clearly recognisable without dominating the page — generally no more than roughly 15-20% of the header's height — keeps the balance right; a logo that's too large reads as the actual point of the page rather than a supporting identification mark.

Colour and consistency with your other brand materials

A letterhead's colour scheme should match the same brand colours used across invoices, a business card, and any other official documents a client or partner might see — consistency across these materials is what makes a business feel established and put-together, while mismatched colours or fonts across different documents can quietly undercut that impression even if each individual document looks fine on its own. If your brand doesn't yet have clearly defined colours and fonts, settling those first (a brand kit is a fast way to do this) makes every subsequent document — letterhead included — consistent from the start rather than needing a redesign later.

Digital vs print considerations

A letterhead that will primarily be viewed as a PDF attachment or on-screen has more flexibility with finer typographic detail and subtle color gradients than one that's meant to be printed on an office printer, where fine details and low-contrast color choices can render less cleanly. If a letterhead genuinely needs to work well in both contexts, testing an actual print of it — not just the on-screen preview — is worth the extra few minutes before finalising the design, since colours and fine details can render meaningfully differently once printed.

Common mistakes

• Making the logo or header design so large it competes with the letter's actual content instead of supporting it.
• Cramming every possible business detail — full address, multiple phone numbers, every service offered — into the header instead of keeping it concise.
• Using colours or fonts that don't match a business's other documents (invoices, business cards), undercutting brand consistency.
• Designing only for on-screen viewing and never test-printing, then discovering colours or fine details don't render well on paper.
• Adding a large decorative background image or watermark that reduces legibility of the actual letter text placed on top of it.

The short version: a letterhead needs a recognisable logo, concise core contact details, and enough white space to read as a clean header rather than a competing design element. Keep secondary details in a small footer rather than the header, match colours and fonts to your other brand documents, and test an actual print if the letterhead needs to work on paper as well as on screen.