Designing Page 3 of a Cover Letter: Adding Image, Logo, Text, and Signature

in this video we're going to continue working on page 3 for our cover letter. On this page we're going to have an image and a logo up top with the text of our cover letter and a signature. So let's get started.

First let's add our logo on the top left hand side. We'll go to cc libraries and ungrouped here we have our signature and our logo. So let's simply drag our logo in and we'll drag it to be about this big on top.

Next let's add a guide for our image. We'll drag a guide down from the top and let's release right at about two and a quarter. Release right there and we'll add our image frame utilizing our rectangular frame tool.

And let's drag it just so it's on the right side of the logo. Next we're going to use v on the keyboard for our selection tool and we want to line this logo up so it's centered with the image. So holding shift we'll select both and then we're going to go to align to key object within our selection options.

We'll select our image frame as the key object and from here we're going to align vertical centers. Now that these are centered we can actually add our image. Feel free to choose whatever image you would prefer and for me I'm going to add this image here and right click go into fitting and fill frame proportionally.

I'll then drag this down just a little bit and I like the look of that there. Next we also want to add a shape and a gradient on the left side behind our logo. To do this let's utilize our rectangle tool and we're just going to add a rectangle inside the margin here and we'll fill up the space to the left of our image.

From here we're going to remove the stroke clicking down on the stroke in our control bar and for our fill now we want to add a gradient. To do this let's open up our gradient panel. We can see this under window and we're going to go down to color and across to gradient.

With our gradient panel now open we can simply click on the gradient below and here we'll see the gradient that we're working with. Let's see how this looks with a logo on top of it. So with the rectangle still selected let's hold CTRL shift open bracket to move it to the back.

Next we can adjust our gradient by moving the toggles in the actual gradient. And in this case we want it to be mostly white but have some black on the right hand side. Additionally we can also utilize our gradient swatch tool found in the toolbar where we can simply click and drag a gradient.

As we can see here we can change the gradient based on how we click and drag. If we click and hold shift we'll see it's a straight line and I'm going to have it extend beyond on the right hand side. We can then adjust the gradient however we'd prefer.

I think I'm going to leave it right about there. This way we can see the logo and the image and it doesn't cover up too much of the logo. Finally I'll click outside and hit w on the keyboard to see what this looks like.

And it looks like there's a bit of a gap here so let's zoom in and it's sitting just above the image so we'll drag it down so it snaps in place. This looks good. We can close our gradient panel here and we're now ready to add our text.

We'll hit w on the keyboard to see our baseline grid. For our cover letter we've been supplied with a cover letter template and so if we go into our Parks Dwell Engineering folder we can open up our cover letter template document. Here we'll see that we have an entire document that's essentially created to fill in the blanks for whatever project or proposal we're creating.

So let's copy all of this text, hitting CTRL A on the keyboard and then CTRL C to copy. Then going back into InDesign we're going to paste this into a text frame. We'll utilize our type tool and let's simply drag an entire text frame from one baseline down all the way essentially to the bottom.

We can then hit CTRL V on the keyboard to paste and we've pasted the text. Next let's stylize it a bit. We'll hit CTRL A on the keyboard to select all and first we'll start by changing the font to Chivo and let's select Chivo Lite.

Next let's increase the size up to 13 points so it's a little bit more readable and let's align it to our baseline grid. Again we can do this by going to our properties panel and going down to the bottom selecting align to baseline grid. As an additional change let's add a bit of space between the lines.

For example we don't want date and deer right on the same lines so let's hit CTRL A to select all again and we're going to just add a space after to each of the paragraphs. We click up we'll see that even though we've only added a little bit we get an entire line of space. This is because if we unalign it to the baseline grid there's too much space for the next line so it drops down to the line below.

In this case I like the spacing of this. This looks pretty good. So from here we simply need to change the date, the client information, and add a signature.

So let's start by adding our signature and we can do this by selecting the signature on the right hand side and we're going to drag it in and we'll click and drag our signature releasing where it's appropriate. We can then hit v on the keyboard to adjust the look of it and let's hit w to see what this looks like. I think this looks pretty good.

Finally if we select our text frame we can scroll down to the bottom and uncheck hyphenate if you'd prefer and finally next to Clark Kent Project Manager let's also add his email ckent at vdci.edu. We'll hit w again and here we've now designed our cover letter. Feel free to go in and change the actual date, the client name, in this case it would say Dear Department of Public Works. In this case we can swap out project as well and add any other details that you'd prefer to add.

Feel free to have fun with it. Let's now hit CTRL S on the keyboard to save our work and we've now completed the cover page two and three of our proposal. Well done! In the next video we'll begin working on our next pages.

See you there