The key to cool letterhead designs is simplicity. Functional and beautiful letterhead designs incorporate the essential design advice, KISS — keep it simple, stupid. Following this advice doesn’t mean the letterhead design needs to be bland or boring. The smart, minimalist letterhead examples you’ll find here are quite eye-catching and memorable, plus they are often paired with additional pieces (a dynamic envelope or invitation) for even more chances to showcase precision design skills.
Letterheads include common contact information, such as name, address, phone numbers, and email addresses. Not only does it contain basic information, but also, as with any project, designing letterheads aligns with the organization’s brand identity or with a client’s personal branding. This includes strategic logo placement and deciding which brand colors to use in the overall design. It’s important that the letterhead design reinforces the brand identity, but also it doesn’t detract from the message that will be written and/or typed on the letterhead.
We found some stellar company letterhead examples that showcase the KISS principle, creative thinking, and precise execution of brand identity. These designs reveal how to create a letterhead that embraces brand identity and draws the attention to the actual correspondence.
9 Cool Letterhead Examples That Embrace and Define Brand Identity
This bright and colorful brand identity project includes a great letterhead design with a font that follows brand color, provides all the basic contact info at the top of the layout design, and is enfolded in a fun, bright, geometrically-designed envelope.
Client: Code Nation
Designer: Lully Duque
This 2018 Regional Design Award winner is designed by Matchstic for Bell Cabinetry and Design. The minimalist letterhead design aligns logo and text to the left while leaving the majority of the space blank for hand-written or typed content. It also features an envelope that’s a contrasting yet complementary shade of grey.
Client: Bell Cabinetry
Designed by: Matchstic
This brand identity project contains the color scheme for Giant Foods as well as the brand typography. The team behind this branding design also created the Giant Foods logo. This is an example on how to create a letterhead design as it uses the defined brand colors, the chosen typography, and the logo that features a silent ‘F’ inside the ‘G’. The beautiful letterhead design features two envelope options.
Client: Giant Foods
Designers: Sharaful Nizar and Almeka Advertising
Another 2018 Regional Design Award Winner, GTB, designed this cool letterhead design as part of the invitation package for the 2017 Henry Ford Estate Dinner Dance. View how this letterhead design example embraces the design elements with powerful simplicity.
Client: Henry Ford Estate
Designed by: GTB
Mohammed Mirza designed this stunning and creative letterhead design for the company, Origami. This letterhead design features strategic location of the company’s logo twice – once in the full version of the logo in the top left corner and then a zoomed in version of just the origami image without the text in the opposite, bottom corner. This juxtaposition draws the eye to the center of the page to the correspondence while establishing brand recognition.
Designed by Mohammed Mirza
Scott Dierna designed this beautiful stationery that doubles as letterhead and an invoice design. He incorporates his brand identity design in a clean layout and adds more visual elements to the envelope of the letterhead. This not only ties in the visual identity, but also establishes brand recognition with a custom envelope design. This clever letterhead design is featured in the 2018 Regional Design Award and Dierna is a winner in the Student category.
Designed by Scott Dierna
Advising Instructor: Hans SchelihasNorthern Kentucky University
PIXFOX designed its own letterhead design and it’s quite simply fun. It highlights its contact information in bright orange that makes the text pop out to the reader. The logo is in the upper right-hand side of the layout design and an image of its fox at the bottom of the page. It still saves plenty of white space for correspondence and it conveys to the reader that the company’s specialty is graphic design.
Designed by Can Timor
Who says doing taxes is boring? Well… th
e occupation of being a tax consultant itself might not be for everyone, but its branding can still be creative. Sanjog Karulkar incorporated numbers and math symbols into a tax consultant’s branding and the results are eye-capturing. The numbers and math symbols make up the consultant’s logo, and it’s strategically placed in the letterhead design.
Designed by Sanjog Karulkar
Minimal Fox’s logo is the application of various, colorful triangles in the shape of a heart. The logo is applied in the letterhead design in the upper left-hand corner and the logo takes up the entire back side of the page. The simplistic and unique design brings in the brand identity while drawing the eye to the correspondence.
Designed by Dawid Cmok
More on the High Design of Letterhead?
All of these cool letterhead examples feature simplistic placement of logo and contact information that does not distract from the actual message on the letterhead. The letterhead designs also reinforces a company’s brand identity. To learn how to create a letterhead design, check out the HOW Design University and Sessions course, Advanced Layout Design or check out the Regional Design Award galleries for more award-winning letterhead examples.