Brochures are an excellent way for businesses to efficiently and effectively communicate information to their audience. Because they offer an inherently compact and easy to digest format, brochures are an excellent, and best of all very cheap, way of disseminating information. In an age where most of our communications with one another make use of digital formats, something of the art of designing brochures and newsletters has been lost by many businesses.

The good news is that as long as you adhere to some simple design principles, you can use the brochure format to your advantage and can make the most of the fact that, particularly to a younger audience, the physical format is now almost something of a novelty. This has had the advantage of making cheap brochure printing widely available.

In this article we take a look at some of the often-forgotten techniques which result in the best quality brochures. A good brochure will not only contain all the relevant information, communicated as simple and in as few words as possible, it will also have an attractive design and layout which will draw the reader in and make them want to read through the brochure in question.

Decide What You Want to Say

Before you begin the design work in earnest you first need to decide exactly what you want to say and how you can most efficiently say it. This second part is crucial as brochures are generally around the size of an A4 piece of paper when unfolded. Given that you will have to give a reasonable amount of this area over to graphical design elements, you only have a limited space to write in.

If you start designing a brochure with only a vague idea of the information that it needs to contain then you could easily find yourself in a constant struggle trying to add or remove words and other elements. By clearly defining what it is that the brochure needs to contain, you can then devise the most efficient way of communicating this information and focus instead on the aesthetic qualities and other graphical elements. These will make your leaflet eye catching and be what initially draws the reader in.

Decide How You Want to Say It

Just as important as what you say is how you choose to say it. The tone of your brochure will be dictated by exactly what it contains, its audience, and the impression that you want to leave on any readers.

So, for example, let’s say you’re producing a brochure to advertise a day out at some public gardens. In this case you would need to make sure that your brochure contained all the relevant information; where the day out will be held, what time visitors need to arrive, what time it finishes, what there is to see and do while there. The best way of making sure that you include everything you need to, is to put yourself in the shoes of a visitor who does not have your knowledge of the situation; ask yourself what you would want to know if you were considering attending.

The tone of a day out at the gardens will also be a relaxed one so make sure that the way you speak to your audience through the text reflects this. If your tone is way too formal, then it will make readers assume that the day out is to be similarly formal in its tone. This could not only put off potential visitors, it could also ultimately cause those who do attend to treat the event more formally than you intend and therefore change the tone of the whole day for everyone.

Use Pictures and Shapes

In the above example, the event being promoted is a day out at some gardens, therefore you should incorporate some natural elements that will evoke thoughts of nature and the outdoor world in to your design. Making use of the colour green and including some photos around the paragraphs of text, for example, will make your brochure look more attractive. There is also some evidence to suggest that theming your brochure in a way that is relevant to the content will make it stick more firmly in the minds of your audience.

No one is going to pay much attention to a leaflet which is blank other than text. For some purposes it may be desirable to focus on the words, and some brochures need to be much longer than others. As long as you have followed the steps above, you should already have a good idea of how to best formulate what you want to say.

Professionally Printed

All this work will have been for nothing if you don’t have your leaflet printed up by a professional company, using the highest quality paper and ink available. You shouldn’t skimp on the actual brochure printing, and as with other forms of printing, such as magazine printing, you can choose print brochures on various types of paper, each of a different quality and feel. Brochure printing from companies such as Print24 combines an excellent price with a quality final product, the same quality you would expect from the print magazines you find in shops.

Well-designed brochures are an excellent way to relay information to customers, they are cheap to produce and distribute, offering a much more cost-effective solution than many of the alternatives.
We look forward to a copy of your brochure attached here in comments and we would love to reach your startup for any requirement or at least understand your business better. #StayInspiredOnTheGo