Here are few tips to remember when designing a company brochure for the first time.
About 50% of the brochure designs we see are ‘over designed’. This means that every possible piece of white space is used up, the thinking behind this is obviously to get the maximum content into a document to get ‘your money’s worth’. Simply cramming a design full of text and images will have a detrimental effect on your printed brochure.

Design it with a newspaper headline in mind. Think about which information needs to be highlighted, for example take the most important message on the page, and ensure this has the largest and possibly most attractive image to ensure it stands out from the crowd, then use the next most important message in hierarchy of size, large to small.

Naturally your eye is drawn firstly to images and photos of any design, this becomes more difficult if there is too much information and too many images are fighting for attention, its not everyone but less usually means more.

Once you have simplified the design and layout, having a brochure printed with simple folding also helps, an A3 folded to A4 is the most simple; likewise A4 folded to A5 is also very popular. We see so many customers trying too hard with complicated folding.

Imagine if you will a businessman who has been given two printed brochures at a trade show. The first brochure is a simple 8 page A3 folded to A4, it is neatly designed and well printed onto quality material, the pages are held in place by two simple staples or saddle stitches, thus allowing the pages to be easily opened and closed. The second brochure lets assume is similar in design and print quality but with a much more complicated fold. It forms the same amount of paper used in the brochure 1, but if folded form the same A2 sheet, then it’s slightly cheaper than having staples. This in theory is correct, but the actual end result isn’t easy to handle, it ends up being like a un-folded road map, cumbersome and awkward to open, and even more awkward to fold back down again – not good when your prospective customer is trying to read your brochure in the confines of the train carriage on their way home.

We are not saying that this type of folded leaflet should be outlawed, its just that it has its place, and using it to cut costs on a company brochure is not one of them.

Best to keep your brochure printing follow standard folding and stitching formats, there is a reason they are standard – it’s because they work!

Dean Williams

Dean Williams is a design and marketing blogger working for Print-Print Limited, promoting business and building brands through quality print marketing. If you’re interested in small business promotion then please get in touch hello@print-print.co.uk