Re: letterhead and the electronic age

[Tom Tadfor Little <tlittle -at- LANL -dot- GOV>]

From Anne Munson:

|Today we updated our organization's letterhead, complete with an email
|address and a world wide web URL. While we came up with one solution for
|presenting this information, I'm wondering what other organizations do with
|all these contact points, including name, address, phone, fax, email and
|web addresses, which add up quickly (we now have an eight-line "address").

|Our biggest debates centered around labeling the information, (ex. email:
|cce -at- muohio -dot- edu), parallel structure, and the use of colons in labeling.
|(Extra colons seemed to detract from the URL.) How have other organizations
|used electronic addresses in letterhead? Is this a silly question?

It's a tough one; and if you wait a year your carefully made decision may
seem really out of date.

My personal take on it is that the fax and URL need some kind of labeling,
while the others do not (and I'd loosen up on the parallelism in the interest
of brevity). You can see one possible solution in my sig.

An important consideration is who'll be reading your letterhead. If you're
an internet access provider, you can assume more computer literacy than if
you're a used car dealership. And your electronic letterhead can assume more
computer literacy than your paper one.

I have a small worry (and it is small) that an international audience might
be a little bothered trying to parse all this stuff, when the postal service and
phone service use different conventions than in the US. (If you don't live
in the US, it's not obvious why 555-0602 is a phone number and 87544-2060 is a
postal code.)

I think colons on the label make it all look busier than it needs to.

Los Alamos Lab doesn't have any standard for this (as far as I know).

P.S. I hope there are some creative postings on this thread--I'm trying to
figure out what to do with my own stationery.


Tom Tadfor Little         tlittle -at- lanl -dot- gov
technical writer/editor   Los Alamos National Laboratory
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