Putting together a brochure or booklet can
be a daunting process if it's your first time.
Here we've put together a handy checklist
of how to go about putting together captivating
content for your promotional marketing material.
In the Beginning...
The first real thing to establish is the format
of your brochure. This may largely be determined
by any budget you may have for the project.
If you have a lot of products and services
to promote then it may be a good idea to break
them down into sections within the booklet,
or perhaps think about organising a folder
with individual inserts detailing each specific
area. At this stage it's worth looking around
at your competitors to see how they go about
promoting themselves. Make a list of good
and bad points and establish early on how
you would ideally like to see your own brochure.
Forward planning
The next step is to produce a rough page plan
of your brochure, at this stage it doesn't
need to have any finished copy but just a
general page by page sketch of what is going
to go where. Making an actual dummy out of
blank sheets of paper that can be scribbled
on will give you a good visual representation
of how things are going to flow.
Putting the words together
Probably the most daunting task with brochures
is collating the copy and trying to decide
where and how it should all fit into the great
scheme of things. You may actually find the
majority of the information you need already
exists in various places e.g. the company
website for example or in excel spreadsheets.
The best text file format for brochure designers
to work with is in a word document. It's not
a good idea to supply hand written scribbles
or printed out letters as this information
is going to have to be keyed in before any
design work can start and will be charged
for. If you are really struggling with the
composition then it's advisable to use the
services of a proffesional copywrighter. Brochure
designers can offer this as an additional
service.
Get the picture
Probably the most instantaneous thing that
is going to really improve any brochure design
is the images used. Getting a friend to take
some product shots on their camera phone is
no substitute for having some quality professional
photography commissioned. Another important
point is to make sure any images supplied
are of a high enough resolution to print well.
Cutting and pasting some jpgs off of your
website isn't going to be good enough. Images
need to be saved as jpgs at maximum resolution
in CMYK format, 300dpi at the approximate
size that they are going to be used at. Alternatively
and at no extra cost brochure designers have
an extensive library of royalty free stock
imagery available to any design clients, which
can really dramatically improve any brochure
design no end.
Supply and demand
When you have the nuts and bolts of your raw
brochure together put everything in a folder
and zip it up to reduce file size, if it comes
in at less than 2mb you should be able to
e-mail it accross without any problems. If
the file size is coming up quite large with
all images then you can either put it onto
a CD and mail it out or use a ftp file server
service such as www.yousendit.com to upload
your files. When brochure designers have the
brochure content, the design work can begin
and once layed out the brochure can be saved
as a low res pdf for client approval. Any
amends and edits can then be carried out -
if neccesary the services of a sub editor
can be used to maintain any grammatical consistancy
to the document - before finally creating
print ready PDF files ready for print.
