Writing – Logos and Stationeries – A Classy Font Effect With MS Word

Say you’d like to impress your customers or organization by a classy logo or header but you do not have the funds to pay a qualified graphic designer to do it for you.

Here is a second best solution that can save you hundreds of dollars. All you need is your Microsoft Word.

In MS Word, type your title – let’s say, “Acme.”

Blow up the font size to at least 36 or 72.

Select your title. Select Format > Font from your main menu to display the Font dialog box.

Select the following settings:

Font – I like Trebuchet and Bauhaus but experiment with different fonts.

Color – White (assuming you are using a white paper. This effect works best if the font color is the same as that of the paper.)

Effect – Engrave.

Click OK and you’ve got yourself a modern looking logo or header.

Spacing (in the Character Spacing tab) – Expanded by at least 10%

Experiment with the other settings in the other tabs of the Font dialog box and see what happens.

If you are designing a stationery, avoid the Number One Mistake that most non-designers commit: stay away from centering everything.

I don’t know who invented the notion that centered text is the easiest to read but it is not. The natural rhythm of the human eye is to scan a page from top-left to the bottom-right. So left-adjusting all your text would be perfectly fine.

There are quite a few professional graphic creation and page layout software out there, like Adobe Illustrator and Adobe InDesign. But why spend the extra money when you have at your disposal great free graphic tools already built into your MS Word?