Designing Branded Letterhead That Actually Works (Not Just Looks Nice)

Some letterhead looks impressive at first glance.

It has the right colors, an elegant header, maybe even a subtle graphic in the background.

But then someone in the office opens the file to write a letter, and the real story comes out. The margins are too tight. The background suddenly feels overpowering. The footer climbs halfway up the page. And now your “professional” letterhead has become a daily frustration.

Letterhead doesn’t get a lot of attention, but it deserves thoughtful design. Not because it needs to be fancy, but because it gets used constantly.

The success of a letterhead design has far more to do with how well it performs on an ordinary Tuesday than how good it looks in a portfolio.

Where Most Letterhead Goes Wrong

If you’ve ever seen a letter whose message had to squeeze around decorative elements, you’ve seen the classic problem: the design tried too hard.

A designer adds a heavy header because it looks bold. Or a soft graphic in the corner because it feels sophisticated. Or a narrow block of text that holds the contact details because it “balances” the page. All of these ideas sound good until someone needs to type more than two paragraphs.

Letterhead has a simple job. It should support the message, not compete with it.

Simplicity Isn’t Boring. It’s the Whole Point.

What separates letterhead that works from letterhead that frustrates people has nothing to do with ornamentation.

It’s spacing, clarity, and predictability.

When the top margin has room, the message relaxes into place. When the logo isn’t oversized, the page feels calm. When the footer stays low enough, the letter feels balanced.

If you’ve ever held corporate stationery that instantly felt expensive, this is usually why. It’s not because it had more design; it’s because it had less, placed well.

Harvard’s readability guidance points to the same truth: clarity and spacing aren’t luxuries. They’re what make the page usable.

The Screen Isn’t the Final Destination; Paper Is

A design that looks great digitally isn’t guaranteed to behave the same way once printed.

Paper has texture. Ink absorbs. Colors shift. A subtle gray watermark that looks tasteful on your monitor might appear much darker when printed on uncoated stock. A gradient that appears smooth on screen may suddenly exhibit faint banding.

It’s the kind of thing you only notice when the letterhead is in your hands, or worse, in a client’s hands.

Even the NIH’s guidance on visual clarity echoes this idea: contrast, weight, and simplicity matter more than decorative beauty when something must be read in print.

Letterhead is no exception.

A Quick Story Every Office Has Lived Through

A nonprofit updates its brand in December. Excited to start the new year fresh, they download a stylish letterhead template and drop their logo into it. The board loves the design.

Then January hits.

Staff start writing grant letters, donor acknowledgments, and volunteer notes. Each person spends an extra five minutes trying to adjust the spacing, move the header, reduce the opacity of the background, or get the footer to behave. Nobody complains out loud, but everyone quietly saves their own “fixed” version.

By February?
There are seven versions of the same letterhead floating around.

It wasn’t a design problem.
It was a usability problem.

Why Matching Matters

Letterhead rarely works alone.

It often travels with an envelope, a return slip, a notepad, or a proposal packet. When these pieces look like they belong together, your communication feels more intentional, even if the recipient barely registers why.

When they don’t match, the opposite happens. It creates a slight sense of disorganization. Not enough to cause alarm, but enough to make the brand feel a bit scattershot.

This is why a well-designed letterhead often leads to updates elsewhere. Once you get the structure right, it becomes the foundation for envelopes, notecards, forms, and other everyday tools.

The Silent Test: Does Your Team Avoid It?

You can learn a lot by watching how people inside your organization use your letterhead.

Functional letterhead gets opened, typed on, and printed without hesitation. Flawed letterhead produces workarounds. People grab old templates. They paste your logo into a blank document. They improvise.

Internal avoidance is one of the clearest signals that the design isn’t serving the people who rely on it most.

Good letterhead disappears into the background in the best way. It’s the page people don’t think twice about using because everything works the way it should.

If It Looks Nice But Doesn’t Work, It’s Time for a Tune-Up

Most businesses don’t need dramatic redesigns. They need small, thoughtful adjustments:

A little more margin here.
A lighter touch on that watermark.
A footer that doesn’t compete for space.
A logo sized for print instead of screens.

These quiet refinements often make a greater difference than a total overhaul. Letterhead should make your communication easier, not more complicated.

Want letterhead that works as well as it looks?

If you’d like help reviewing your current design, or building one that your team will actually enjoy using, we can walk you through simple, reliable options that fit your brand and your workflow.

Letterhead doesn’t need to be overdesigned to be effective. It just needs to work.