Letterhead Through the Years

Our company letterhead has gone through several iterations over the the last decade. I still remember the first one with the red A over the M logo.  That was maybe 1997.  If I find a copy of that one, I'll post it here.

2000 - 2005 Letterhead

 

Our early 200x logo just slightly evolved over 5 years as we added brand logos in the footer.  We used A.O. Smith's electrical motor logo rather the Water Heaters logo, even though we were much bigger into water heaters than motors.

2006 - 2008 Letterhead

 

This revision was due to a change in logo.  As part of a marketing strategy, we wanted "Water Systems" in our logo.  "Amici" as a word is obviously rather generic.  The Amici pizza shop wasn't commercialized then.  Nowadays, we get confused reactions from callers mistaking us for the pizza parlor. 

 2008 - 2009 Letterhead

A designer's rendition of our letterhead.  Minimalistic design.  Symmetry.

2010 Letterhead

This is really just a minor revision.  A line of brand logos was added to put some connection to water products.

2011 Letterhead Revisions

This year's letterhead is a major revamp.  Why another change?  The 2010's line of logo felt tacked in.  The 2008 design is elegant, but sometimes we need the company name somewhere there.

In the header are the company logo and specific company details.  To adapt the letterhead to our other branches, only the header needs to be modified.

I have had mixed reactions to the logo placement on the upper right corner.  It's definitely not common.  Nevertheless, I felt a right aligned header magnifies reader focus to the content of the letter. 

In previous iterations of this design, all the letterhead text are grayed instead of solid black to further emphasize the document content.  But printing issues have made the text too dithered and illegible.  So we settled with solid black.

The lower left box of brand logos balances the weight of the upper right header placement.  The logos are small but recognizable.  It might be an issue if you read things with a magnifying glass.  But again, I didn't want the all-too-many logos to detract reader focus.  When the reader, out of curiosity, gives attention to the small logos, she will hopefully not find it hard to distinguish the brands we represent.

The lower center box are tag lines of our products and markets, centered for the persons unfamiliar in our industry.  Our website is also put here at the bottom, to act as a portal for the recipient to get more company information.

Last but not the least, the lower right box emphasizes to the reader the national level of our business.