brochure design - how to design a brochure - diy brochure design

How to design a brochure

When it comes to designing your new brochure you have a few options. First, if you have the right software and skill you can develop your own brochure layouts. The drawback to DIY brochure design however is that once you spend all the time and effort getting the brochure to look just the way you want, the final file you wind up with may not be what the printing industry refers to as "print ready." Print ready means that the files you have provided the print meet their basic requirements for being printed on their machines.
This makes the job go faster and ensures that the final product will look like you hoped it would.

If you do decide to develop your own brochure layouts here are some tips to keep in mind:

1: Choose a printer BEFORE you begin your design. Most printers will have online templates that show and explain their file requirements. You need to know the specifications of the final print ready file for your particular printer so you can design your layout to their specs from the beginning. Otherwise you will have to reverse engineer your files to the printer’s specs.

2: Understand the difference between a high resolution and low resolution image. Just because an image is large in dimension doesn’t necessarily mean that it is high in resolution. Almost all print shops prefer that any photo used in your brochure design be at least 300 DPI. DPI stands for dots per inch. The more dots of color within a square inch, the higher resolution the file is. Photo resolution only works one way, you have to START with a high resolution image. You can’t take a low resolution photo found online and just increase it’s DPI in photoshop, that doesn’t make it high resolution. You have to START with high resolution imagery. There are several stock photo websites online where you can purchase photos in high resolution for your brochure design project. Just make sure when you order that the file you are getting is at least 300 DPI in resolution. Try www.BigStockPhoto.com

3: Bleeds, bleeds, bleeds. More than likely you will be having your brochure printed in full color, and, you want that color to carry all the way to the edge of both sides of your printer. For the printer to print your brochure properly the final files you send to them for printing should have bleeds in place. When a printer prints a 8.5"x11" brochure they actually print from a file that’s just a little bit bigger, say 8.75"x11.25" then they cut the final piece down to the actual size of 8.5"x11". That way your imagery extends all the way to the edge of your printed piece. So when you design your brochure you should allow for bleeds.

4: CMYK is the way to go. All full color brochure printers online use the CMYK or 4 color print process. In this printing process there are only 4 colors printed, using 4 separate printing plates; Megenta, Cyan, Yellow, and Black. Before you provide your print ready files to the printer they need to be converted to the CMYK format. You can do this easily using photoshop. You will notice that the colors of your design change. This is probably because you developed your brochure layouts using monitor colors, there are millions of monitor colors. However the colors of a full color brochure are limited to what the combination of the 4 CMYK colors can provide. Basically anything that is really bright will print darker, and some colors just aren’t available at all in CMYK.

5: It may take several programs. Sometimes you can get away with using just one graphics program to develop your brochure design, normally though it takes a combination of graphic design programs. For instance a designer may start a brochure layout in Adobe Illustrator or Quark, do some photo editing in Photoshop, then import the edited photos into the Illustrator design, save it as an EPS, open it back up in Photoshop, convert it to CMYK and then save it as a high resolution raster file. It just depends on what works best, what the designer is used to working in, and the requirements of the printer printing the brochures.

6: When in doubt, hire a professional. There is a HUGE learning curve with developing a print ready file for professional, full color printing. Sure, you can throw something together and then tell the printer to deal with it, but they will charge you for it. Normally about $79 an hour. And more than likely they will just ask for all the files you used and redesign the whole thing from scratch. I’ve heard of printers charging upwards of $1000 to do this. If you aren’t certain that you can provide a print ready file or files to your print shop hire a professional graphic designer to develop your brochure. Not only have they done it dozens of times, they know the printer lingo. They know what questions to ask and how to provide the files in the formats requested by the printer. If the last couple of tips made your head go fuzzy, don’t design your own brochure, hire a professional brochure design company.

Still want to design your own brochure? Here are some tools to do just that.

Brochure Design Template PDF
This brochure design template assume a .25" bleed requirement. Some printers require as little as a 1/8" bleed but should be able to work with a .25" bleed as well. Check out the templates and notice the SAFE area. Your text and core imagery should stay INSIDE the SAFE area to avoid being cut away when the printer trims your brochure down to the correct size.

Brochure Design Programs
There are two main types of graphic design programs, vector and raster.

Vector graphics can be increased and decreased in size without losing resolution. Very similar to a font. If you blow up a font in Word for instance, the edges stay smooth no matter how big. If a image is drawn in vector format it can be increased and reduced in size without losing resolution, logos are designed in vector graphics programs for this reason.
Here are some vector graphics programs: Adobe Illustrator, Quark, Xara X.

Raster graphics have a set pixel per inch or dot per inch within their layout. That means they will look good at the size they were designed at, but when you increase their size past a certain point, they will become pixilated and grainy, and won’t print clearly.
Here are some raster graphics programs: Adobe Photoshop, Photo Impact.

Most professional graphic designers use a combination of vector and raster graphic programs to complete a brochure layout. Since brochures have text and photos the vector program is best suited for laying out the text while the raster program is best for editing the photos. Normally a graphic designer will develop the main brochure layout in a vector program, importing the high resolution images/photos into the vector layout.

Need a professional graphic designer to develop your full color brochure layout?
We can develop your custom brochure layouts and even have them printed for you.
We take care of all of the technical aspects and provide the printer with high resolution, print ready files.

Email: sales@logodesign-webdesign.com with your brochure design needs for a fast, custom quote.

Entire contents of this article © 2010 CJ Hughes for LogoDesign-WebDesign.com