1. Know Your Purpose
What do you want to accomplish with this brochure? What's the main objective? Who's your target market? These three questions will influence the design, construction, and layout of your brochure.
What do you want to accomplish with this brochure? What's the main objective? Who's your target market? These three questions will influence the design, construction, and layout of your brochure.
Before you start designing, sketch out the flow of the entire brochure so you know what content you will need for each page.
2. Write and Review Your Copy
When writing your copy, remember to only include what is essential. Your reader wants to get through all of the information in a short amount of time. Don't risk them skipping over sections due to excessive filler text. Also be sure to include a call to action - this ties into the goal of the brochure. Lastly, remember to always proofread your content, nobody likes a typo!
3. Construction
Now that you have your copy and sketched layout, this will help you determine the number of pages you need, which could influence your binding technique.
Is your brochure short enough to be a folded piece of paper, or do you have quite a few pages? Saddle stitch is the most common and cost-effective binding technique for multiple pages. This method requires your page count to be a multiple of four to work. However if you want a more premium look or have too many pages, perfect bound is the way to go. If you prefer your pages to lay flat, or have a page count not divisible by four, spiral bindings may work best.
Pro Tip: When designing for perfect bound or spiral bindings, remember to make your inner page margins larger to make up for the lost space.
Remember to also consider paper weight and texture. Thicker paper will feel more premium, whereas thin, practically transparent paper will feel cheap. Consider how construction will affect the reader's perception of your company as well. Will your paper be glossy, silk, or matte? Will you have spot gloss, or even soft touch coatings?
4. Use High Resolution Photos
Good looking product photos will go a long way. Make sure they're bright, colorful, and consistent. When budget or time is a factor feel free to use stock photos. But the trick is to be sure that they don't feel like stock photos. High resolution photos with a DPI of 300 or more will print just fine, don't settle for anything less. Pixelation isn't good for your brand!
5. Follow Your Brand Guidelines
Be sure to stay on brand by following your brand guidelines with font and color choices. Don't have a concrete set of design rules? Just determine your color palette and fonts before you begin designing. A good rule of thumb is to try and limit your fonts to only two or three max.
Additional Considerations:
Do you need a table of contents?
How about page numbering methods?
Is your design theme creative and fun, or more serious and corporate? (You don't want a high-end looking brochure for a charity, but you would want a good looking product catalog to stand out from others at a tradeshow)
Consider all design elements such as photos, graphics, charts, patterns and other accents so each are consistent throughout.
