This paper deals with a new approach to develop an envelope that engulfs all poles of a time-delay system. Through linear matrix inequalities, we are able to determine envelopes for retarded and neutral time-delay systems. The envelopes proposed are not only tighter than the ones in the literature, but, with our procedure, they can also be applied to verify the stability of the system and design state-feedback controllers, which cope with design requirements regarding alpha-stability.