Free letterhead maker for company letters and invoices

What a letterhead is actually for

A letterhead is not decoration. It is the part of a letter that answers three questions before anyone reads a word: who sent this, are they real, and how do I get back to them.

That is the whole job. Everything else people add tends to work against it. A letter arriving on paper that carries a company name, an address and a way to reply is taken seriously in a way that the same words on a blank page are not, and that is true whether it goes to a client, a bank, a landlord or a tribunal.

Which is why the best letterheads are quiet. They frame your words rather than competing with them.

Who needs one

• New businesses. The first quote, the first invoice and the first client letter all look more established on headed paper.
• Freelancers and consultants. A letterhead is often the cheapest thing that makes a one person operation read as a business.
• Anyone sending formal correspondence. Notice periods, complaints, references and legal replies.
• Small offices sending invoices. An invoice on headed paper gets queried less often than one that arrives bare.
• Clubs, charities and community groups. Anything that has to write to a council, a funder or a member.
• Companies that have outgrown their old one. Rebrands, address changes and new phone numbers all mean a new head.

What belongs on it, and what does not

The parts that earn their place

• The company name, as it is registered, not a shortened trading version unless that is what you actually trade as.
• A postal address. Even for a business that works entirely online, an address signals that somebody real is behind it.
• One or two ways to reply. A phone number and an email address is plenty. Three phone numbers is not helpful, it is indecisive.
• A website, if you have one worth visiting.
• The legal small print, along the bottom, in a size nobody reads unless they need to.

The parts that usually hurt

• A large logo. It eats the space your letter needs and reads as insecurity rather than confidence.
• Several colours. One accent is a design decision. Three is a collision, especially once something colourful gets printed underneath it.
• Background images and watermarks. They make text harder to read and they turn a cheap print job into an expensive one.
• Social media icons. Fine on a business card, out of place on formal correspondence.
• A slogan longer than a few words. A tagline is a label, not a sentence.

Choosing a layout

Four arrangements are offered here and they suit genuinely different situations.

If you are unsure, classic is the safest thing to send to an institution and modern is the safest thing to send to a customer. Minimal deliberately leaves out the logo, which is not an oversight. Some businesses look better without one, and a poor logo does more damage than none at all.

Getting the logo right

The single most common problem is a logo saved as a JPEG. JPEG cannot store transparency, so the file carries a white rectangle around the artwork. On a white page you may not notice it. On anything else it appears as an obvious box, and it will still be there when somebody prints your letter onto cream paper.

Use a PNG with a transparent background wherever you can. Between five hundred and twelve hundred pixels wide is ample, since the tool scales it to fit the layout and a letterhead logo is rarely more than five centimetres across in real life.

If your only copy is a JPEG with a white background, our background remover will lift it off and give you a transparent PNG. If the file is enormous, the image resizer will bring it down first.

The footer is a legal matter, not a design one

This is the part people skip, and in several countries it is the part that is actually required.

Many jurisdictions oblige registered companies to show a company registration number, the registered office address and sometimes a tax or VAT number on business correspondence, including letters and emails. Regulated professions frequently have their own rules about naming the body they are registered with. Partnerships and sole traders often face different requirements again.

The rules vary enough that guessing is a poor strategy. Check what applies where your business is registered, and put it in the footer once. It sits in small type along the bottom where it belongs, and then you never think about it again.

A4 or Letter

A4 almost everywhere in the world, Letter in the United States and Canada. They are close in size but not the same, and printing one onto the other causes small annoyances: an A4 design on Letter paper loses a little from the bottom, and a Letter design on A4 leaves a strip of empty paper.

Pick whichever your own printer is loaded with. If your correspondence regularly crosses between regions, A4 is the more forgiving default.

Actually using it

Two routes, and which one suits you depends on how you write.

In a word processor

Download the image version and place it in the document header in Word or Google Docs. Every page then carries it automatically, including page two of a long letter, and you type your text normally underneath. This is the practical choice for most people, because it keeps everything editable and needs no special paper.

Printed paper

Send the PDF to a printer and have a quantity made up. You then print your letters onto that stock, or write on it by hand. It costs money and it is still the version that carries the most weight, particularly for legal correspondence and anything a client will hold. Get the footer right before ordering five hundred sheets.

A practical middle ground

Keep the PDF as your master and print letters onto plain paper with the head included each time. Modern printers handle it perfectly well, it costs nothing to change your phone number, and nobody receiving the letter can tell the difference.

Leaving room for the letter

A letterhead that takes up a third of the page is a letterhead that forces every letter onto two sheets.

The layouts here are deliberately shallow for that reason. The header finishes well inside the top quarter of the page and the footer sits below the writing area, which leaves the whole middle free. If you are designing your own elsewhere, that is the proportion worth aiming for: the head should announce you and get out of the way.

The same applies to page two. Long letters traditionally use a continuation sheet carrying just the company name, or nothing at all, rather than repeating the full head. If you are placing the image in a word processor header, most of them let you set a different first page for exactly this reason.

Why the PDF holds real text

Some letterhead tools give you a picture of a page. It looks fine on screen and then goes soft the moment somebody zooms in or a printer scales it, and the text in it cannot be selected or searched.

The PDF from this page holds live text and vector rules. Your company name is characters rather than pixels, so it stays sharp at any size, prints crisply, and survives being scaled by a print shop. The image download exists as well, because a word processor header genuinely needs an image, and that one is rendered at three hundred dots per inch so it holds up in print too.

The preview you see while typing is produced from the same layout as the PDF rather than being drawn separately, which is why what you download matches what you designed rather than approximating it.

Nothing here leaves your device

A letterhead carries your business address, your direct phone number, your email and often your company registration details. Your logo is a file you may not own the right to hand to a third party. None of that belongs on a stranger’s server.

Everything on this page happens in your own browser. The logo you choose is read locally and never uploaded, the design is saved to this device so a refresh does not cost you your work, and both downloads are written on your own machine. Open the network panel in your developer tools and watch it run if you would rather see that than take our word for it.

No account, no export limit, no watermark and nothing to unsubscribe from later. When the letterhead is done, our experience letter tool writes the letters that go on it, and the merge tool puts the head and the pages together into one file.