Pixels To Print: 5 Brochure Design Tips

1. Know Your Purpose

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

3. Construction

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

5. Follow Your Brand Guidelines

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.