If you are designing a brochure or booklet for your company, product or service here are 10 easy to follow steps to help you along the way.
Research:
Collect and study brochures from around your community. What is the acceptable industry standard of brochures there? What makes one brochure design more appealing than another? You can develop your sense of good design by carefully studying existing designs in the marketplace and deciding for yourself what works best. You can also learn from the mistakes of others and see what design styles or errors to avoid.
Keep it simple:
Keep your message in mind and include only those ingredients necessary to communicate the message. If you choose graphic elements to ornament your brochure, ask yourself whether they help to direct the reader’s attention, or simply create distraction.
What is the purpose of your brochure? Create a 'Brochure Checklist' to decide what information you want to cover, and arrange these components in order of importance. The clearer you are about the order of importance within your information, the better your brochure will be.
Prioritize Content:
Once you have determined the relative importance and sequence of the particular components in your message, you will be ready to consider how to treat each of them. The most important items should obviously receive more of your reader’s attention. They should be larger, bolder, brighter, or in some other way made to stand out.
Make sketches and move the various elements around. Try re-positioning one or more elements to see how your design is affected.
Wording:
Try to include some of the twelve most powerful words in the English language, while also avoiding cliches, slang or any currently trendy jargon.
The twelve most powerful words, according to advertisers and marketers are...
1. You | 7. Discovery |
2. Money | 8. Results |
3. Save | 9. Health |
4. New | 10. Proven |
5. Easy | 11. Guarantee |
6. Love | 12. Free |
Font:
Choose a font that will express the style you desire (professional, humorous, casual…) while still keeping your message clear. Use a minimum of two font styles (to avoid being plain or boring) but also use a maximum of three font styles (to avoid clutter and inconsistency). These fonts can still be varied in size, weighting or colour in the individual parts of the design according to their importance. Read more on fonts styles here. In general a clean and simple font is best. Such as the one below.
You can download this font and thousands of others at www.dafont.com.
Bars and boxes:
Boxes, borders and bars work well for directing one’s attention and separating busy areas, as they create a contrast with the background. However, too many can make your brochure design look cluttered and will desired contrast will be lost if everything/too much is 'boxed off'. Instead explore other options for grouping and separating, such as the use of negative space as explained below.
Negative space:
Use empty space to create a relationship between the contents and the page. Bring the specific information into focus on the page by adjusting the space around it. The amount of negative space in a design affects its overall tone of lightness or heaviness. Empty space can also be used to frame or align the content without the need for boxes or borders.
Color Scheme:
Color can be applied as ink on paper or as the paper itself. There are hundreds of paper colors available, yet some of the most effective brochures are done in only one or two colors. Black and white brochures can often be more dramatic than color.
Whatever colour scheme you choose be sure to look into colour theory to ensure the right message about your product, service or company is being sent out. Differrent colours evoke different emotions in viewers and each colours has attached connotations that we subconsiously associate with it.
Paper selection:
Paper comes in all sizes, colors, and textures. Ask your teacher about paper options. Using recycled paper can add an interesting flair to your brochure design, and it helps reduce the impact we make on our natural resources.
The ISO (international Standards Organisation) 'A' Series of paper sizes, seen above, has become the global standard for document sizes and your brochure should be based of one of those. See the common document sizes table for more details.
Proofread and Test:
You should proofread your final design several times before having it printed. Once printed, it’s too late to fix an error that you didn't spot, without incurring extra costs.
Read lines backwards to check for errors. Step back and look critically at the overall layout, can it be read from a distance? Is it interesting enough to grab peoples attention? If the answer to either of these questions is no you may need to tweak your design or possibly consider some attention grabbing techniques.