How to Make a Free Company Letterhead Online
A letterhead is the strip of identity at the top of every letter, quotation and notice your business sends. It is the cheapest credibility you will ever buy, and you do not have to buy it at all - you can build a proper one in a browser in about ten minutes.
This guide covers what actually goes on a letterhead, the sizes and margins that matter when it gets printed, what Indian businesses specifically need to include, and the mistakes that make a design look homemade.
What a letterhead actually contains
Most people over-fill a letterhead. The job of the header is to identify you and get out of the way, because the letter is the content, not the branding.
A header that works usually has:
- Your logo, sized so it reads at a glance without dominating
- The business name, spelled exactly as it appears on your registration
- One line of contact - phone and email, not all four channels
- A rule or colour band to separate header from body
The footer carries everything the header does not need:
- Full registered address
- Website
- Registration identifiers
- Any regulatory line you are required to print
The reason to split it this way is practical. Recipients read the top to know who sent it. They read the bottom only when they need to reply, verify or file it.
Size and margins
Get this wrong and the printer eats your design.
| Setting | A4 (India, most of the world) | US Letter |
|---|---|---|
| Page size | 210 x 297 mm | 8.5 x 11 in |
| Safe margin (all sides) | 12-15 mm | 0.5 in |
| Header depth | 30-45 mm | 1.2-1.8 in |
| Footer depth | 20-30 mm | 0.8-1.2 in |
Two rules that prevent most problems:
Keep everything 12 mm from the edge. Ordinary office printers cannot print to the paper edge. If your colour band runs off the side, a home or office printer will leave a white gap on one side and clip it on the other. Either keep a margin, or accept that the design only works with commercial printing.
Leave the middle alone. The body of the letter needs roughly 200 mm of clear vertical space on A4. If your header is 60 mm deep and your footer is 40 mm, you have squeezed the letter into a window that will not hold a page of text plus a signature block.
What Indian businesses need to include
This is where generic international letterhead templates fall short, because they are built around a different set of conventions.
Depending on how your business is registered, you may need to carry some of these on correspondence and on documents that accompany a supply:
- GSTIN - if you are registered under GST
- CIN - for companies registered with the MCA; company letterheads conventionally carry the CIN along with the registered office address
- Registered office address - the address on record, which is not always your operating address
- PAN - commonly printed even where not strictly required, because clients ask for it
- Udyam / MSME registration number - if you want the MSME status visible to buyers
The safe approach is to put the registered address and identifiers in the footer, keep the header clean, and check the current requirement for your specific entity type rather than copying another company's layout. Requirements differ between a proprietorship, an LLP and a private limited company, and they change - so confirm against the current rules or ask your CA before you print a thousand sheets.
Letterheads in Indian languages
If you send correspondence in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi or Urdu, most online letterhead makers will quietly fail you. They load Latin web fonts only, so your Devanagari or Tamil text either renders as boxes or falls back to a system font that looks nothing like the rest of the design.
What to check before you commit to a tool:
- Type your business name in your script directly into the preview, not just in the export
- Look for broken glyphs - empty rectangles mean the font does not cover that script
- Export to PDF and open it on a different device. Fonts that render in your browser sometimes are not embedded in the exported file
- If you use Urdu, check the direction - right-to-left text that renders left-to-right is a font and layout problem, not a typo
A bilingual letterhead - business name in the local script, contact details in English - is common and reads well, because the identity carries in the language your customer thinks in while the contact details stay unambiguous.
Choosing a layout
Four arrangements cover almost every real use:
Classic centred. Logo and name centred at top, rule beneath, address in the footer. Formal, safe, right for legal notices, government correspondence and anything that will be filed.
Left-aligned with a side band. Logo top-left, a vertical colour strip down one edge. Modern without being loud. Works well for services businesses.
Split header. Logo on the left, contact block on the right, both sitting above a hairline rule. This is the most space-efficient option - it identifies you in about 30 mm of vertical space.
Footer-weighted. A minimal header with just the logo, and a substantial footer carrying everything else. Best when the letter itself is long and you need maximum body space.
Pick one and use it everywhere. Consistency across your quotation, invoice and covering letter does more for how established you look than any single design choice.
Signature and stamp
If you are printing, signing by hand and scanning, ignore this section. If you send PDFs directly, you need both a signature and, in many Indian B2B contexts, a company stamp.
A few things that make a digital signature look intentional rather than pasted:
- Scan or photograph your signature on plain white paper, then remove the background so it sits on the letterhead rather than in a white box
- Size it to roughly 45-60 mm wide. Larger than that reads as a graphic, not a signature
- Place it above a printed name-and-designation line, not floating on its own
- Keep the stamp partially overlapping the signature, which is the convention on physical documents
Be aware of what a pasted signature image is and is not. It is fine for routine correspondence, quotations and covering letters. It is not a digital signature in the legal sense - for anything requiring one, you need a Digital Signature Certificate from a licensed certifying authority.
Exporting for print and for email
These are different jobs and the same file rarely does both well.
For printing, export PDF. It embeds fonts, holds vector logos sharp at any size, and prints at the right physical dimensions. If a commercial printer is producing your stationery in bulk, ask whether they want CMYK - screen colours are RGB and bright blues and greens shift noticeably when converted.
For email and digital documents, PDF still wins for the finished letter. Export PNG only when you need the letterhead as an image to drop into another application, and export at a high enough resolution that text stays crisp - a 72 DPI screenshot of a letterhead looks exactly like a screenshot.
Keep the editable source too. You will change the phone number eventually.
Common mistakes
- The logo is too big. A letterhead logo rarely needs to be more than 25 mm tall. If it dominates the page, the letter looks like an advertisement.
- Too many contact channels. Phone, email, website, WhatsApp, three social handles and a QR code is not thorough, it is noise. Header gets one line, footer gets the rest.
- Low-resolution logo. A logo pulled off your own website is usually 200 px wide and will print soft and pixelated. Use the original file.
- Colour that does not survive black and white. Plenty of documents get photocopied. If your design relies on a colour contrast that becomes two similar greys, it stops working.
- No blank space for the letter. Design the header and footer around a realistic body, not the other way round.
- Different letterhead on every document. Quotation with one layout, invoice with another, letter with a third. Pick one.
Doing it free, in the browser
You do not need design software for this. A browser-based letterhead maker handles the sizing and margins for you, which is most of what goes wrong.
The Letterhead Maker on Tooljin is free and does not require a signup. It ships nine templates, handles logo upload, drag-and-drop signature placement with free positioning, and a company stamp. It renders Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Punjabi and Urdu scripts with proper fonts rather than falling back and breaking. Export goes to PDF or PNG, multi-page.
Once your letterhead is set, it is worth matching your other documents to it so everything you send looks like it came from the same business. The GST Invoice Generator covers invoices, and Pro Writer is useful for drafting and formatting the letter body before you place it.
A ten-minute checklist
- Pick one layout and commit to it
- Upload the logo at full resolution, size it to about 25 mm tall
- Header: name plus one contact line. Nothing else
- Footer: registered address, website, and the identifiers your entity type requires
- Keep 12 mm clear on every edge
- If you use a non-Latin script, check the preview and the exported PDF separately
- Add the signature and stamp if you send PDFs directly
- Export PDF for print, and open it once on another device before you rely on it
- Save the editable version
- Use the same design on your invoice and quotation