How to resize logos for Salesforce Classic Letterhead (Email Templates)

This is one of those things that SHOULD be so simple! Why is it not simple? *Shakes fist*

My real goal: Automate sending emails to acknowledge donations in Salesforce.

My interim goal: Update email templates that will be used in aforementioned automation.

Where I got stuck: Updating the letterhead of the aforementioned email templates.

This sent me down a rabbit hole of wondering if, instead, I should be using Lightning Email Templates? But there are a bunch of forum posts where people said Lightning Email Templates are trash (at least in this one specific way). On one hand, I like the idea of having Email Templates “up front” (available from the App Switcher menu, which can be made accessible to everyone) as compared to hiding templates in the “Setup” configuration part of Salesforce. On the other hand, it seems like Lightning Email Templates can’t do everything that Classic can. As the ping pong ball bounced back and forth, I began to wonder if now was even the right time to contemplate this change. No one on the team working on this cares about which kind of email template we were using. They just want to be able to send Donation Acknowledgments consistently, reliably, virtually, and then move on to do more important/creative/fun things! Identifying the “right” features of SF use … is my job. Oh and remember what I said before? I was … le stuck. And still hadn’t made any progress…

The logos as I uploaded them into SF were incomprehensibly large. The “classic letterhead” looked laughably out of proportion. Why doesn’t Salesforce take the file and convert it into a usable size? Why doesn’t Salesforce “let” you resize the image in the Template? Nobody wants a header so large that you have to horizontally scroll to see it! Not being a graphic designer, I turned to the internet to try and “compress” PNG or JPEG files, but simply couldn’t get them small enough to be usable. Every time I updated the file, I needed to go to Classic>Documents>Record, upload a file, and then go over to Setup>Classic Email Templates>Letterhead and update the Logo. Trying this over and over again with different files was tedious! I think I have become spoiled by uploading images directly into a live page, and resizing in that live page, rather than storing source files in some type of CMS and referencing them from there. Despite all of this tinkering, I had trouble finding out what the photo specs even were for image files referenced in Classic Letterhead. The tinkering wasn’t working and I didn’t know what I needed to change to get the images to show up properly.

Here’s a source that says for HTML Letterhead, you want to be in the range of 550 pixels x 100 pixels in the logo. Um, how do I count those? Also, after all of my digging re: Classic v Lightning, I was perplexed to see another “type” thrown into the mix. Do I need to start over and figure out HTML Email, which I knew was at least somewhat a subtype of Classic… but could also be its own thing?

Luckily, I found a free tool for resizing images. In this process, I learned that “compressing” and “resizing” were different operations. If my understanding is correct, this is what I learned: compressing makes the file take up less storage and sometimes removes sharpness/color specificity in ways that are mostly imperceptible to us. By compressing the file, I did not make it “look” smaller. Using this new tool, I was able to set the number of pixels I had room for, and the tool worked backwards to produce a file that I could use. Hooray! I set the horizontal pixel count to 200 and finally got a workable image.

Next, I needed to create another image file, this time for the “Capital Campaign” version of the Donation Acknowledgment letter. This was tricky because I was provided with two different images that needed to be part of this letterhead version. You can probably guess by now that the Salesforce Classic Letterhead feature only lets you put one image in the header. I needed a single image file that contained both logos!

Once I downloaded the image files for both logos (intending to take a screenshot of them, combined), I realized that I had a new problem on my hands. They were different sizes and looked out of scale, and one of them had a transparent background which looked funky in my screenshots. I needed to do some more graphic editing! This time, I turned to Canva, where I figured I could rescale images and deal with the background issue. I also considered using Powerpoint or Google Slides for this. Yep, I’m really not very sophisticated when it comes to graphic design software. After I had the image visually coherent, then I used the Image Resize tool again to set it to 200 px (horizontal).

After dealing with the bare minimum file requirements for logos to display decently, which don’t seem to be clearly articulated in the documentation, I then had to deal with a bunch of other quirks in setting up Classic Email Letterhead namely:

• Logo files must be uploaded to a “Document” record (only available in Salesforce Classic)
• In the Document record, “Externally Available Image” must be checked
• In the Email Template record, “Available for Use” must be checked
• There should be a naming convention for Letterhead, if you have more than one
• You cannot delete old Logo records if they are connected to old letterhead records that may be connected to Email Alerts (and a bunch more unravelling to do). In general, I think this is good (prevents Cascade delete situation) but made this a lot more tedious for me

Having spent hours upon hours on making the Letterhead, I am now ready to embark on what really needs to get done: sending out the emails! Oof!