Are you convinced that in today’s paperless-world brochures are irrelevant? If so, the following stats from Bentley University will change your mind.
- Around 95% of visitors learnt about business through a brochure.
- Almost 80% people visited the venue mentioned on the brochure.
- And seven out of ten tourists or visitors tend to pick up a brochure.
The statistics show brochures are still effective and can become a great source of promoting a product or providing important information about your business.
But you need to follow a systematic and structured design strategy to grab your target audience’s attention.
When designing a brochure, there are several elements you need to work on. If you’re curious to explore those elements further, continue reading the post.
1) Choose an Appropriate Format
Formatting your brochure in the right way makes all the difference. You can involve your client in this part as well to discuss the correct medium for the message or the type of product your client wants to promote.
For example, if you’re designing a brochure for luxury products, a tri-fold or z-fold brochure won’t work well as this kind of brochure needs white space and bigger pictures.
But there’s no limit when it comes to being creative with the format of your brochure. If you notice, many concert organizers design brochures that unfold into a poster.
This variety is easy to send by mail and practical to hang anywhere, so that the brochure remains visible.
2) Design a Compelling Cover Design
To capture your target audience’s attention, it’s crucial to design a creative brochure cover. You can think about designing something great by combining stunning photos and a font that stands out.
For example, a minimalist brochure cover is ideal if you want to achieve a clean and simple look for your brochure cover. Minimal cover designs look unique and give you enough space to describe your business or product.
And if you’ve assigned a task to design a brochure for a beauty or fashion brand, know that it requires extra creativity due to fierce competition in the niche.
But it shouldn’t stress you. You can design an eye-catchy brochure cover by keeping it simple and elegant.
On the flip side, you can opt for a dark color theme to design a stunning cover for your brochure. The best part of dark themed brochure is that it helps highlight the content effectively. And these brochure are also perfect for higher-end brands.
3) Select an Eye-Pleasing Color Palette
Finding colors that get the brand’s message across is a task itself, especially if you’re designing a brochure for a startup that is striving to achieve brand identity.
But you can ease the process by following this strategy:
Understand Color Formula
It’s no secret that color evokes emotions and set the mood. But the science of colors requires the application of accurate formulas.
If you genuinely want to design the perfect brochure, it’s best to follow basic rules and create an appealing color palette. You can do that by using a color wheel to develop any color scheme from scratch and understanding the following:
- Complementary uses two opposite colors.
- Analogous uses adjacent colors.
- Triadic uses three evenly spaced colors.
Understand Color Meaning
It’s also essential to learn the meaning of colors and use them accordingly while designing your brochure.
Scientists are convinced that colors effect human brain. When you expose yourself to a certain color, it stimulates different reactions. For example, some colors are excitant, some boost appetite or give off the feeling of coolness or warmth.
Some generally accepted meaning of the colors are:
- Red: love, passion, anger, danger.
- Blue: calmness, loyalty, sadness.
- Green: nature, abundance, freshness.
- Yellow: hope, happiness, concentration.
- Black: elegance, mystery, power, mourning.
- White: purity, innocence.
Use Palette Generators
You can also visit a few websites to choose the right color palette for your brochure. These websites feature palette generators, so you don’t need to have any prior knowledge regarding color theory or psychology.
More so, these websites automatically create a color palette in just a few seconds using mathematical formulas. If required, you can tweak the results too.
These websites are also connected to certain user communities, so there are high chances of finding ready-to-use color palettes.
4) Make the Most of White Space
When we talk about effective brochure designing, the saying “’less is more” starts to make sense. The less here translates to white space. Space between images and words – an essential design element that creates a major impact.
Therefore, white space isn’t “negative” or “wasted” space. In fact, it’s good and has two types:
Active White Space
Active white space is left intentionally to achieve a better structure on brochure and make the content readable.
Passive White Space
Passive white space is kept between different elements or around a page.
Furthermore, white space is perfect for minimalist designs or to showcase a professional image. It possess the power to direct your target audience towards whatever you want. There are also the following reasons to consider white space while designing your brochure.
Elevates Appeal and Effect
You can use white space to boost the visual appeal of your design. It demonstrates quality and professionalism. You might have seen minimalistic designs in the luxury market.
For example, higher-end cosmetics brands utilize white space in their brochures to showcase their products as high-quality and expensive.
Maintains Professional Vibe
White space helps you incorporate a crisp and concise look to your final artwork. Using it, you can make your brochure appear professional and impress your target audience.
Makes Things Stand Out
If you want to make things stand out, add white space to your brochure design. Keep the creative minimal and allow words and imagery do all the talking.
Remember, photos stand out more on the white background than on a colored background.
5) Go For the Right Font
While designing a brochure, designers spend more time on deciding color-scheme, layout, or format and don’t give much attention to font. But deciding an appropriate font is essential for your brochure to stand out.
If you’re confuse about which font to use while designing your next brochure, here are few options to help you.
Helvetica
Are you looking for something cool and trendy? Helvetic has got you covered! It was designed by Max Miedinger in 1957 and known for its clean and practical form.
Over time, the font has developed and expanded to different font weights. And today, we’ve 34 different fonts in the Helvetica family.
Usually, it uses sans serif type that is easy to read and makes the perfect choice for brochures. You can find commercial brands, such as Panasonic, Harley Davidson and Toyota that use Helvetica.
Futura
A classic font, Futura was designed in 1927 by a German Typographer – Paul Rennar. The typeface was inspired by Bauhaus design.
It looks great on print and brochures. With its simple geometric form, it creates a modern appearance and makes an appropriate choice for headlines and body fonts.
More so, brands like Volkswagen, HP and Crayola use Futura.
Century Gothic
Created in 1991, Century Gothic is significantly inspired by the geometric sans serif style of 1920’s and 1930s.
This font isn’t only popular for brochures and print but is famous in media too. For example, the television show Star Trek: Enterprise uses Century Gothic font.
It makes the perfect choice for headlines – thanks to its clean and straightforward design. And its sleek sans serif finish make it a modern font.
6) Incorporate Appropriate Graphics
You need to add elements or attractive material to make your brochure look attractive and capture your target audience’s attention. Aim to persuade your audience naturally using your brochure.
You can do that by focusing on the right placements of graphics. For example, if you’ll keep it in a stack form, try to get creative with the edges.
More so, inserting three dimensional objects in your brochure is another creative way to attract your target audience.
You can also think about incorporating boxes to your brochure design for two reasons. First, it will allow you to organize information. Second, it will highlight essential information.
There’s nothing wrong in incorporating other shapes to your brochure. Shapes help enhance the “interesting element” of your brochure design. You can opt for angular or circular shapes to draw attention to the important elements of your brochure.
However, avoid adding several boxes or shapes as it will make the design cluttered and won’t look appealing.
7) Use Only High Quality Photos
Using images with higher resolution is always a great idea when it comes to creating a consistent and expressive design.
Remember, high-quality images bring color and vibrancy to the brochure design whereas low-quality images lead to bad impression.
While adding images, don’t forget that if an images is looking good on the screen, it doesn’t necessarily look better on the paper. Because digital and print media have different resolutions.
Images available on the web don’t reproduce well on the print if you don’t resize them. But you can fix it by knowing the size of the image in pixels and dividing each value by 300 to decide at which size in inches your images need to be printed.
For example,
Web image size 600 ÷ 300 = 2
900 ÷ 300 = 3
Maximum print size = 2×3 inches
Wrap Up!
Brochure designing can be fun and exciting. But there are certain elements to consider. If you keep those elements in mind while designing your brochure, you’ll come up with a compelling and structured brochure.
Remember, a good brochure design helps you connect and communicate with your target audience. Therefore, do your research, brainstorm unique ideas, and design the brochure that speaks for itself.
