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 release right at about two and a quarter. Release right there, and we'll add our image frame using our Rectangular Frame Tool.

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. 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 add our image. Feel free to choose whatever image you would prefer. For me, I'm going to add this image here. Right-click, go into Fitting, and select Fill Frame Proportionally.

I'll then drag this down just a little bit—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 use our Rectangle Tool, and we're going to add a rectangle inside the margin here and fill up the space to the left of our image.

From here, we're going to remove the stroke by clicking down on the stroke in our Control Bar. For our fill, we want to add a gradient. To do this, let's open up our Gradient Panel. We can find this under Window, 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 we're working with. Let's see how this looks with the logo on top of it. 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. In this case, we want it to be mostly white but have some black on the right-hand side. Additionally, we can use 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. I'm going to have it extend beyond 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.

It looks like there's a bit of a gap here, so let's zoom in. 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. 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 created to fill in the blanks for whatever project or proposal we're creating.

So let's copy all of this text by 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 use our Type Tool and simply drag a text frame from one baseline down 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 change the font to Chivo, and select Chivo Lite.

Next, let's increase the size to 13 points so it's a little more readable, and let's align it to our Baseline Grid. Again, we can do this by going to our Properties Panel and scrolling 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 "Dear" on the same lines. So let's hit CTRL + A again, and we'll just add space after each paragraph. When 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 from 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. This looks pretty good. From here, we simply need to change the date, the client information, and add a signature.

Let's start by adding our signature. We can do this by selecting the signature on the right-hand side, dragging it in, and releasing it where it's appropriate. We can then hit V on the keyboard to adjust the look of it, and hit W to see what it 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 next to "Clark Kent, Project Manager, " let's also add his email: ckent@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—for example, it would say "Dear Department of Public Works." You can also swap out "Project" and add any other details you'd prefer to include.

Feel free to have fun with it. Let's now hit CTRL + S on the keyboard to save our work. We've now completed the cover—Pages Two and Three—of our proposal. Well done! In the next video, we'll begin working on our next pages.

See you there.