How to Design a Brochure: The Best Practices
Table of Contents
Flipping through the pages of a physical brochure about a business or product can give your target audience a distinctive experience and help you stand out from the competition in the digital age, where everything is done online.
We’re here to simplify the process of creating a brochure for your business, product, or service more accessible.
We’ll walk you through every step of how to design a brochure in this in-depth guide. This article will guide you from selecting the ideal format and making financial preparations to selecting a printer to create the finished product.
There are numerous varieties of brochures available. You must comprehend what they are to decide what kind of brochure you want to create yourself.
What Makes A Great Brochure?
A designer is frequently encouraged to use his imagination and be innovative. However, to ensure consistency, you must adhere to a precise set of guidelines when creating conventional print designs, such as brochures.
The majority of print materials, including books, newspapers, and brochures, have been created in essentially the same manner for hundreds of years for a reason. To give users a better experience, consistency is crucial.
The sole objective of a great brochure should be to inform your target audience.
A brochure may be a fantastic instructional tool that yields practical results, whether you’re using it to advertise your items at an event, brand a product, highlight your business, or explain a marketing strategy to your sales force.
You can swiftly disseminate your message with brochures in a visually appealing way.
The following are some essential components of a fantastic brochure design:
- A stylish and contemporary layout
- Streamlined content layout
- Using straightforward language
- Convenient paragraph and content organization
- Utilize a few colors and graphics.
What Does a Brochure Design Cost?
There are numerous methods for designing a brochure, depending on the target market and available funds.
Design it Yourself (DIY)
Using brochure templates, you can create a brochure on your own for under $30 without any prior design experience. All you’ll need is Adobe InDesign or Photoshop to edit the template.
Use an Online Tool
You can design yours using an online brochure maker tool as well. These programs have free templates and are pretty simple to use. This is a fantastic choice if you design a straightforward flyer or booklet. However, since thousands of other individuals use the templates, it’s recommended to avoid using free online tools for professional and business projects.
Hire a Freelancer
You can hire a freelance designer to create a brochure for you if you don’t have the time to do it yourself. Hiring a freelance brochure designer might cost anywhere from $50 and $300 (and sometimes much more), depending on the type of brochure you’re developing.
Hire a Design Agency
Consider using a design agency if you’re creating a brochure for a large corporation or well-known brand. Hiring a company to create an introductory tri-fold brochure may cost anywhere from $1000 to $2000. Once more, it will rely on the agency’s caliber and the kind of brochure you are making.
Hire an Unlimited Graphic Design service
With an infinite graphic design service like All Time Design, you can submit as many design requests as you’d like, and each one will be fulfilled one at a time.
Fair pricing for this service is offered to both agencies and independent contractors. For that sum, businesses can also commission the creation of new design materials.
This implies that you can create many designs for a fixed fee.
Brochure Formats & Specifications
Several distinct types of documents spring to mind while discussing brochures:
Bi-Fold Brochure
It is possible to fold this one-page paper to make it simpler to read. It is frequently employed to advertise a product, service, and brand.
Tri-Fold Brochure
Tri-folds are folded in three sections instead of two like bi-folds. For example, most brochures are tri-fold, giving you six panels on which to display data.
Brochure Documents
Multiple pages of documents like this are used to create detailed publications like annual reports, business profiles, marketing materials, product catalogs, etc.
A4 or US Letter formats are typically used for brochure papers with precise dimensions, including company profiles, business reports, or the majority of multi-page documents. Additionally, it’s customary to leave a bleeding area for the document.
Pamphlet (A Flyer or Leaflet)
A pamphlet is a one-page leaflet that can be used to inform readers and sell products. Additionally, tri-fold and bi-fold pamphlet designs are available.
A brochure’s overall dimensions are 210 x 297 mm for A4 size and 8.5 x 11 in. for US Letter, with a 3 mm bleeding area.
It is possible to develop brochure designs in both portrait and landscape formats. Additionally, A5-sized square brochures are available.
There are other brochure design formats such as z-fold, parallel fold, roll fold, accordion fold, single-gate fold, double gate fold, half + half fold, half + tri-fold, half fold, and half fold (letter)
Planning Your Brochure Design
Arguably the most crucial step in the procedure is planning how you will approach your brochure design. You must decide what kind of content to put in your brochure design at this point.
What’s Your Brochure Objective?
Determine the purpose or primary goal of the brochure to get your planning process going. The aim you intend to pursue will determine the brochure’s whole layout and content.
The following questions can be used to determine the purpose of the brochure design from your customers’ perspective or even from yourself.
- What message do you hope the brochure will convey?
- What kind of design style might work for your brand?
- Have you ever tried a brochure design? If not, why didn’t it work?
- What is the brochure’s primary point of emphasis? Is the goal to spread brand or product awareness or to educate your audience?
Who’s The Target Market For Your Brochure?
A buyer’s persona is a crucial component of any effective marketing plan for a company. Developing a thorough profile of your target customer assists you in determining who the ideal customer for your product is.
For instance, if your company sells dog food, all dog owners shouldn’t be your target market. To better target the ideal client, you need to collect more specific information about your customers, such as their age, gender, geography, educational background, occupation, dog breed, and age.
You may create a well-designed brochure using the same approach. You can choose fonts, writing styles, and images that will appeal to your target audience by using all the information you have on your buyer persona.
Where Will Your Brochure Be Distributed?
Are you producing this brochure to distribute at a conference or event? Or do you want to give it to people who enter your store? Or do you mail it to your current clients?
The style and appearance of your brochure will also be influenced by how it is distributed. For instance, the brochure needs to be lightweight if it will be mailed or distributed as a handout at an event.
Consider how you’ll distribute your brochure and design it correctly.
Best Practices and Tips for Brochure Design
The process of designing a brochure is simple. However, developing a fantastic and effective brochure design requires meticulous planning and original thought. These creative tips will give you a head start.
Develop Your Message
Before you even consider making a design for your brochure, you must have a clear message of what you want to say and how you want to express it.
Because the most crucial component is your message, the key is to know your target customer.
It doesn’t matter how creatively you design something if your message isn’t vital and straightforward and doesn’t appeal to your audience in terms of language and imagery they can understand. Then, your brochure won’t be effective.
Consider the scenario where you designed a brochure for new parents to promote your kids’ gym. You may say, “We’re kind and fun; come join us!” So, to complement your brand and appeal to your target audience, use straightforward, pleasant language and bright, vibrant imagery. Your customers wouldn’t likely understand you if you use complicated language.
On the other hand, your message would probably be quite different if you were producing a brochure to market your services as a financial advisor. In that case, utilizing straightforward language and bright graphics might come off as too childlike, and your ideal customer wouldn’t take you seriously.
Before designing, be aware of your message to make judgments that will strengthen it.
Use a Consistent Design Style
Any form of brochure design should adhere to a consistent aesthetic. Everything in your brochure, including the titles, images, fonts, colors, and backgrounds, should relate to one another.
An excellent strategy to develop a design style is to consider your potential customers, what they enjoy and find objectionable, and then develop a style that combines their preferences with your branding style. Then maintain that design aesthetic across the entire brochure. This also holds for visuals.
Make it Worth Keeping
You shouldn’t just concentrate on making a nice-looking brochure. But make an effort to make a lasting impression. There are different approaches you can take depending on the type of brochure you’re developing to accomplish that.
For instance, you can collaborate with a company to include a coupon code on your brochure or pamphlet. Encourage people to keep your flyer rather than just read and discard it. Or you may make your brochure interactive by including a quiz in the materials. And make sure to follow the latest quiz ideas and trends. On the reverse of the flyer, you might provide a list of practical daily tips.
First Impressions Matter
Based on your brochure, someone will appraise your company or brand in less than a second. But first, they’ll glance at the cover of your brochure to decide whether or not they can trust your brand.
Make a solid and good impression by all means. This entails creating a fantastic front page or cover for your foldable brochure document.
Format for Skimming
There is a reason why newspapers are going out of business. Long text paragraphs are no longer desirable. Instead, they prefer to access Facebook and browse news articles.
Make careful to keep your brochure free of lengthy paragraphs. Instead, make it skimmable by using numerous bullet points, headings, and subheadings.
Write Simple and Short Sentences
Unless you’re making a brochure for a group of professors at a university, you should always use a straightforward and approachable writing style.
Write in brief sentences and stay away from difficult dictionary words. Simply said, write as though you were speaking to a friend. Your customers will find your brochure more relatable if you do this.
Make it Easy for the Readers to Respond
Ensure that the business name, website, phone number, and email are prominently shown in the brochure. In addition, include any social media accounts your company may have. Finally, including a QR code is a brilliant idea to make it easier for your readers.
Give an Option
Flex your design muscles if you are given the option to create multiple designs for a single assignment. Brochures don’t all have to look alike. Having multiple brochure designs with the same information is one way to adapt this conventional promotional tool to the changing market demands. The audience will then be able to select the one they like best.
Make the Brochure Worth Keeping
Choose a design that will be durable. This entails utilizing premium paper, picking the appropriate fonts and colors, and including insightful information. Some aspects of the design should raise its worth and make it worthwhile to preserve.
Brochure Design Inspiration & Ideas
Examining the existing brochures created by experts for brands and businesses is a terrific approach to acquiring inspiration and ideas for your own. Here are several options for eavesdropping on other brochure designs.
Dribbble
Dribbble showcases professional designers’ creative endeavors and portfolios.
Behance
A platform for designers’ online portfolios is called Behance. There are many different designs and projects, including brochure designs, that qualified designers have created. To get ideas for different kinds of brochures, check Behance.
A sizable collection of brochure designs posted by people is also available on Pinterest. You can further refine your search on the website by selecting from various categories, including bi-fold, square, and other brochure design layouts.
Designspiration
A website dedicated to finding inspiration for all types of design work is called Designspiration. It has a selection of designs of the highest caliber, including printed designs and brochures created by recognized businesses.
Envato Elements
A marketplace with lots of design templates is called Envato Elements. You can use the site’s search function to identify and download various brochure design templates for your work.
Designing Your Brochure
Now that you are aware of the proper methods for getting ready to write a brochure let’s move on to the exciting phase of the procedure: designing the brochure.
Choose Your Brochure Size and Format
You may design various brochures depending on the purpose and the products you’re promoting, as discussed in the brochure form and specifications section. Now is the time to decide.
- 210 x 297 mm for an A4 brochure with a 3 mm bleeding area
- 5 x 11-inch US Letter brochures with a 3-mm bleeding area
- 8 x 8.3-inch A5 brochure with a 3 mm bleeding area
- 8 x 8-inch square brochure with a 3-mm bleeding area
You have complete control over the format you pick and the number of pages in your brochure. When in doubt, though, use A4 size.
Brochure Templates vs. Designing From Scratch
Making a brochure from scratch is labor-intensive. You must first organize the content arrangement, create a mockup design, and prepare the design layout. Using a template, you can significantly reduce the time and expense involved in that design process.
You can create a high-quality brochure quickly and easily by using a professional-grade template that you can download for less than $20 and use in Adobe InDesign or Illustrator.
These brochure templates offer ideas for a practical content layout that you can click to edit and paste your text into. They also include picture placeholders that you can simply drag and drop your images into to replace the stock images.
Here are a few perfect brochure template examples.
Business Report Brochure Template
Company Profile Brochure Template
Corporate Brochure – InDesign & Word
Product Catalog Brochure Template
Exeelo Modern Brochure Template
However, it’s advisable to engage a professional and spend money on a distinctive and beautiful brochure design if you’re working on a brochure for a large business that will print thousands of copies and mail them out statewide. All Time Design can help achieve this.
Practice Font Restraints
It’s simple enough to choose the wrong typeface or font when you start designing your first brochure design project. While seeing a brochure in several different typefaces may be humorous, it can also be demoralizing for certain people, especially potential customers.
When selecting a font or fonts, exercise restraint. If your business already uses a distinctive font, continue from there. You can use that font throughout the brochure or add one or two additional to make it look more attractive.
No matter what type of font you decide to use, avoid the error of overusing them in your brochure design. To maintain uniformity and excellent readability throughout your brochure design, use no more than two fonts (one for headlines and the other for body content).
These unique fonts can be used in your design.
NORMAL Minimal Sans Serif Font
Orion Pro Modern Sans-Serif Font
Write Your Entire Brochure Copy
Before you start designing the brochure, it is crucial to have the copy ready.
It would help if you created your brochure page layouts by the copy and the content, whether you’re making a brochure from scratch or using a preexisting template. But unfortunately, the opposite is not valid.
Observe these guidelines while you write the copy.
- Use a Simple & Friendly Writing Style
- Edit Ruthlessly
- Integrate Storytelling
- Write Headlines Like A Pro
- Keep It Simple
Remember Your Brand Identity
Keep your brand identity top of mind as you begin the design process. Whatever type of brochure you’re designing must be consistent with your entire branding because these elements describe your brand’s visual appearance and feel.
Select design elements (colors, fonts, and images) that are consistent with the tone and substance of your brochure and your brand personality. Make sure to use the brand colors and fonts in your brochure design if you’ve previously decided on them.
Focal Point is Your Call-to-Action
To entice your readers to act is the primary motivation behind your brochure’s design. Furthermore, you must inform them clearly and forcefully if you want them to behave.
What if your call to action (CTA) is buried in a wall of text on the last page of your brochure? No one will notice it. Make your CTA clear, large, and difficult to miss if you want users to act upon it.
Add Appropriate Images
Without images, a brochure is just a pamphlet. Humans are visual beings. We tend to be more drawn to it when gazing at something lovely, engaging, or entertaining. And texts hardly ever have this appeal. Yet images do.
Select pertinent and appropriate images related to the brochure’s core theme to make the design more reader-friendly. Also, stay away from utilizing stock photos and generic images. If you must spend money on images, purchase high-resolution images. Or it would be much better if you had the money for a photo session for the brochure. Check out the guide about marketing brochure design.
Use perspective to your advantage
It’s not necessary for typography to run entirely horizontally across the page. Utilize eye-catching angles to add visual interest and produce standalone visual pieces. Here, the font follows the checkered pattern, drawing the eye to the page’s middle and developing an intriguing harmony.
Brochure Printing Tips
Having your design printed on paper completes the brochure design process. Even though it could seem like a simple process, you’ll be forced to make a few crucial choices that will impact your brochure’s effectiveness. Below are need-to-knows for your brochure printing.
Choosing Paper Stock
One of the first things you’ll notice when contrasting a newspaper with a magazine is the caliber of the paper. The paper used to print magazines has a thicker texture and might occasionally be glossy. This distinguishes newspapers from magazines and provides them with a more upscale appearance and feel.
Brochures fit the same description. Your brochure’s quality and the final product will depend on the type of paper you use.
You will need to make three crucial selections when selecting the paper stock for your brochure:
- The color of the paper
- The weight of the paper
- Type of the paper
Different Paper Weight
There are various weights of paper stock. These weights contribute to the thicker, heavier feel of your brochure. Here are a few of the standard printing weights.
- 70 pound (104gsm) Text
- 80 lb. (118gsm) Text
- 100 lb. (148gsm) Text
The inside pages of your brochure are printed on “Text Weight” paper. The cover pages of your brochure are printed on a unique kind of paper called “Cover Weight,” which feels significantly thicker than text weight paper. These papers are used to print items like postcards and business cards.
- 80 lb. (118gsm) Cover
- 100 lb. (148gsm) Cover
If you don’t want your brochure to have a card-like cover, you can choose a more substantial or glossier paper for the cover than you choose for the interior pages.
Choose your paper weight carefully depending on the type of brochure you’re producing. For instance, it will seem unduly heavy and uncomfortable if you use a thicker weight while printing a brochure with several pages.
Different Types Of Paper
Finding the right kind of paper for your brochure is the next step. The printing of brochures uses four different types.
- Gloss Coated: The gloss-coated paper, frequently used in magazines, will give your brochure a premium and high-quality feel.
- Matte Coated: When printing brochures with several images and illustrations, this is the ideal kind of paper to use. Because the paper feels expensive and the matte coating decreases glare.
- Uncoated Paper: Printing your brochure on uncoated paper is an attractive option if you want to keep things straightforward and environmentally responsible.
- Textured: Embossed and textured paper designs may provide users with a distinctive experience.
FAQs
What is brochure design size?
Different forms and sizes of designs are available.
How do I design a brochure?
1. Identify the market that your marketing brochure is aimed at.
2. Support your messaging using illustrations, icons, and graphics.
- Maintain a uniform style and color scheme.
3. Layout the brochure around your copy, images, and branding
- Center your content within each area or section
- Photos should be cropped and sized to match.
- Use bright colors and background images to define each area
- Limit your color selection to two or three.
- Keep a lot of white space
4. Modify the text and color to use the same design for other products.
How can I start a brochure?
- Give a clear message on your front page.
- Make sure the primary brochure contents are brief and easy to read
- Include further information, such as contact information, on the back.
Wrapping Things Up
Designing and printing a brochure involves many decisions, tips, and responsibilities. Our primary objective was to give you a straightforward method and a few tips for designing a brochure without putting too much thought into it.
You are now equipped with everything you require to create an awesome brochure.
Although these tips will guide you sometimes, they may be too technical. Without quality design experience, a template can still be disoriented after editing. That is why it’s best to let professionals handle your projects. With All Time Design‘s subscription packages, you can create as many high-quality designs using an assigned graphic designer. Then, all you need to do is share your ideas and watch the designer work.
All Time Design will help you ass that personal touch you imagine. However, its services cover more than just this. You can also design motion videos, blog post interfaces, banners, flyers, and lots more.
