Whenever I do identity kit designs (stationery), I always provide my clients with a Word version of their letterhead. If there was bleed on the original, I create a version without it. This way the client has the ability to send Word documents containing their branding as well as a backup in case they run out of their printed letterheads. I’ve created this tutorial upon request to show you how I do it.
I’m going to use Alfa Electronics as an example in this case since there wasn’t any bleed.
Here is the original vector art:
First off, make sure you have the artboard the same size as the printed piece will be (in the US it’s letter). We can do the export two ways. In Illustrator, go to File > Export.
Choose JPEG and then check “use artboards” as we want to make sure it’s 8.5″x11″. In CS5 if you had any more documents in there (such as the entire kit), you would want to click “range” and tell it which artboard to use.
Make sure that you choose maximum quality, RGB (since they will probably not use a CMYK printer in-house), and 300 DPI.
Then click OK.
If you have a solid header/footer you can go into Photoshop, open the JPG, crop out the top and bottom as separate files and save them separately. You could also keep this entire large image for the header/footer as one large background. That’s what we are going to do.
Let’s open Word. Double click on the top part of the document to open up the header/footer. If you aren’t sure how to do this, go to “Insert”, then click on “Header” and then click “Edit Header”.
Now once the header is opened we need to insert the letterhead so under the tab “Insert”, click “Picture”.
Find the full image and insert it.
It’s probably going to look like this: too small. We need to make it the correct size so right click and choose
“Size and Position”.
Click “Reset” and then OK.
Now it should be the right size, but it is not correctly aligned.
We need to edit the text wrapping now. Right click and choose “Behind Text”.
Once that is done, you just need to move the image around so it’s positioned correctly.
Now you can close the Header/Footer. To do this, go to the “Design” tab and choose “Close Header/Footer”.
Now we need to set up the margins for the text because right now the cursor is in the logo.
On the rulers, just drag to your preferred margin allowance. For this design, I want the cursor to start at the “alfa” type and leave available space under the logo. The bottom margin is fine already.
This is what it looks like fixed:
Set up your preferred fonts. You can now save the document because that’s all there is! To do the process with individual header/footer pieces, you still need to reset the size and do the text wrapping and positioning, you will just have one image file for the header section and one file for the footer section.
Now here it is with content inside.
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