When it comes to designing your letterhead and envelope its a good idea to design your business card at the same time. This will enable you to create consistent branding for your company and ensure that your business card, letterhead & envelope will all look like they belong together; If you give someone a business card and later send a letter, you want those pieces to reinforce each other.

Envelope size

The standard business envelope is 9 x 4 Inches. It’s called a #10 envelope. The European size is 110mm x 220mm, and it’s called a C4 envelope. Whilst, however these are the standard sizes, nothing is stopping you from using a different size envelope which more suits the type of mail your company often needs to send. As long as your envelopes are designed with the same brand as the rest of your stationary, size doesnt really make any difference.

Create a focal point

One element should be dominant, and it should be dominant in the same way on both the letterhead and the envelope (and the business card). On most corporate identity materials, the logo if often the focal point, but if you have any other brand related element which suits more as a focal point, be sure to use that.

Just as an example, take a look at the stationary for one of my businesses, DigitalTRAX. Whilst the logo is one of the main elements on all stationary, you will notice that the real focal point is the blue tint, and is consistent across all of the business branding materials, including adverts, stationary, cars, and even clothing.

Alignment

Choose one alignment for your stationery! Don’t center something across the top and then put the rest of the text flush left. Be brave-try flush right down the side with lots of line spacing. Try setting your company name in huge letters across the top. Try placing your logo (or a piece of it) huge and light, maybe as a shadow beneath the area where you will type (as Ive done with my stationary for DigitalTrax above). On the letterhead, make sure to arrange the elements so when you type the actual letter, the text fits neatly into the design of the stationery.

Second page

If you can afford to make a second page to your stationary, take a small element that appears on your first page and use it all by itself on a second page. If you are planning to print, let’s say, 1,000 letterheads, you can usually ask the printer to print something like 800 of the first page and 200 of the second page. Even if you don’t plan to print a second page, ask the printer  for several hundred blank sheets of the same paper so you have something to write longer letters on.

Faxing and copying

If you ever plan to send your letterhead through fax or copy machines, don’t choose a dark paper or one that has lots of speckles in it. Also avoid large areas of dark ink, reverse type, or tiny type that will get lost in the process. If you do a lot of faxing, you might want to create two versions of your letterhead-one for print and one for fax.

So as you can see, with a little thought and careful consideration in planning, creating corporate identity you can be proud of isnt that difficult. For more information on designing with your companies brand in mind checkout Tips For Effective Business Card Design, and Create Consistent Branding.

Popularity: 100% [?]

Well, i finally got round to the redesign of my weblog. I had been planning to redesign this blog for a long time and also had drawn a rough sketch of how I wanted the new design to look like but it was delayed due to many reasons. After i decided to comit to blogging professionally, i thought id was time that i invest the time in creating a unique design, and saught the advice and recommendations of the people who really mattered. Our Readers.

I took all of the recommendations into consideration, and worked on the new design for about a week and finished with it yesterday. I did extensive testing with it using Firefox, Opera, IE 6 and 7. Everything looks fine so far but I still have a few things to do like optimizing the CSS, removal of useless plugins and some other things to decrease page load time.

Some of the changes made in the new design

• Switched from a 2 column to a 3 column for neater look
• We are now making use of the popular and & recent posts plugin to highlight some of our best content
• We have installed the Do-Follow plugin to reward users for leaving a comment on our posts. This means that when you comment, search engines will recognise your link and give you credit for it in their algorithms.
• Installed MyAvatars plugin which will display an avatar next to your name when leaving comments. This only works if you are a MyBlogLog user and have an avatar uploaded to your account.
• The design as a whole is slightly wider, and has incorporated a ‘web 2.0′ look as this seems to be popular at the moment, and i love the whole web 2.0 look.

I would really appreciate your feedback and what you think about our new design. Are there any areas you think could be further improved? If you spot any errors, please let me know that as well.

Popularity: 19% [?]

When you think of branding, you might think of logos, colors, taglines, and names relating to a given product, company, or service. Although branding encompasses those element, true branding is a far more powerful and subtle issue than you might expect.

Successful branding is about creating an emotional relationship between an individual and the representative company or product. This means that good branding creates a response in people—whether a tagline makes us feel comfortable, or a logo makes us feel energetic, or a color scheme makes us calm—these responses are the desired results of effective branding.

Branding can be achieved using a variety of techniques. Contemporary marketing theory breaks down branding into two types:

• Direct Experience. In direct experience branding, the emotional relationship is one-to-one. If you have a great burger at Ye Olde Burger Shoppe, the satisfying results of that meal relate emotionally to the product and brand.
• Indirect Messaging. The indirect method uses slogans, sponsored events, and promotions to connect people to product brands. The key to successful indirect messaging is repetition, usually in the form of TV and magazine ads, and billboards.

Websites can benefit from both forms of marketing, although websites themselves are almost always going to be a direct experience for people these days. You go to a site for a reason—to read aWeblog, purchase copies of a favorite author’s books, and so forth. You interact with the site, and your experience there creates the emotional one-to-one feeling found within direct experience marketing.

When creating a lasting relationship between an end user and a product, company, organization, or service, Web designers need to plan the direct experience to have a specific emotional result.

For example, my bank’s website provides excellent service, useful management tools, and provides me with an emotional sense of security. This kind of bonding between a site’s visitor and a product can be accomplished using a range of specific usability techniques.

But we can also draw from indirect messaging techniques to enhance our goals. All of the following things can work on the indirect level by providing repetitive images:

• Using consistent placement for logos from page to page
• Using consistent color and graphic styles

Ads on websites are considered indirect messaging, but the actual website itself is a direct experience.

• Typography
• Iconography

Combining an effective direct experience and consistent statement of brand will help you to bond your site visitors to your site, creating lasting, rewarding relationships. When you embark on your branding efforts, be sure to checkout our corporate branding mistakes post to ensure you dont make the mistakes that many others do!

Popularity: 7% [?]