Designing Brochures

Brochures are the paper ambassadors of your business. They represent your company, your products, and your brand on your behalf. With that in mind, the design and layout you choose for your brochures becomes essential.

There are a few fool-proof methods for designing brochures that you can use to your benefit. The father of modern print design, David Ogilvy, put as much emphasis on research as he did the artist side of layout. His tried and true methods can serve as a blueprint as you design your brochure.

Pictures
The first thing that people look at when they pick up your brochure is the pictures. As Ogilvy notes, the eye finds the graphic elements the most interesting and typically goes there first. You can use this to your advantage by doing two things: use pictures and print in color. Just because you do not have a picture on your brochure does not mean that a customer will not look at it, but using pictures will only help. Knowing that this will be the first place customers look will aid in selecting pictures that guide the customer through the rest of your presentation.

Captions
After the pictures, the customer will look at your captions of the pictures. Captions can be omitted, but using captions to highlight features of products or to emphasize key points of the brochure will only help to drive your ideas home. Keep captions short and to the point. Make sure they also are relevant not only to the images but also to the brochure as a whole.

Headlines
The next place that Ogilvy states the customer’s eye will go is to the headline and sub-heading. Headlines should always be included any time there is more than a few sentences of copy or content. This helps the customer decide whether or not they want to read the “fine print” or details of the brochure. Headlines should highlight the main point of the following copy in a few words. Sub-headings give you the opportunity to expand on the headline and divide the content into smaller pieces.

Copy
The last thing a customer will read is the copy. This is not to say that the actual descriptive text is unimportant. Unless the other elements of the brochure (pictures, captions, headlines) guide the customer to the copy, then the customer may never get to the point where they actually read what you have to say.

Design Basics: Brochures

Brochures aren’t always for the faint of heart or for those who don’t have enough time to adequately design something that will work.

Brochures also aren’t the cheapest form of marketing. You can get plenty of great advertising for your buck if you do them right, but you still have a larger initial investment when compared to other kinds of marketing.

But one thing you can do to help ease the financial burden is be aware of what goes into designing an effective brochure. If you have the right kind of software like In Design, you might even be able to start designing brochures yourself.

The first thing to look at is the brochure layout. How many pages do you plan on having and how do you plan on having your brochure folded? There are all sorts of different methods for folding brochures, and each carry a certain advantage. I won’t list every kind of folding method here given how many there are.

Once you do know what kind of folding method you plan on using decide the right progression for your information. A brochure should have a strong linear feel to it. Make sure yours flows along a single line of thought from beginning to end. You can have several points that you’re making, just don’t jump around from topic to topic. People will get confused before they bother to finish reading your brochure.

After the writing is decided on, pick up some good visuals to go along with it. A color brochure will always be more appealing than a plain black and white one. Think about the brochures you’ve seen, and I’m guessing most had a strong visual appeal. They had bright pictures and images on the cover to get people interested in reading what else the brochure had to say.

The brochure design will be a combination of the writing and the images. Some topics are simply going to have more that you need to say about them whereas others will center on the images. Most travel brochures are loaded with pictures because this is the most important selling point for them: letting people see where they’ll be going.

Think about the reason you’re writing your brochure and you should know exactly how much writing you’ll need and how many pictures will best compliment it.

Designing a brochure can be a rather daunting task, especially if you’ve never done one before. Make sure you take things one at a time. Do your writing first, pick out the style of folding you want next, and then decide on the number of images that will work best.

So long as you don’t let all of it bog you down, you can write brochures that are more than worth the money it took to make them.