Design Matters: Optimising Your Brochure Design

In this next edition of design matters, we will discuss more on optimising your brochure design.

As discussed earlier in Brochure design results with just 3 simple steps, there are elements which can make or break your brochure design.

Optimising Your Brochure Design
Here at TILT, we do hear from clients pretty often that “We need to design a brochure.” When we probe further to ask for the materials, very often, we find that the information (especially copy) is not ready yet. To add on, the clients will usually ask for sample designs. There are several times where we will advise the client that the design of the brochure cannot be done unless we have sample copy.

Know Your Objective or Intention
The fact is, to optimise your brochure design, the objective or intention of the brochure needs to be determine first. Having said that, this does not imply that by knowing the target audience, the brochure design objective or intention is known. Of course, knowing the target audience is a must but knowing whether the brochure should be one of an advertising nature or informative nature will bear a huge significance.

Brochure Design Copy
Next up, the copy which will be used is of great importance as well. Should it be written in a formal manner or perhaps in an informal manner? Can we do it in an interview style? How long should the text be? All these are of great importance. This is where copywriters come in. Don’t save the money. Pay for the copywriters as they can better represent your company with the copy which they come up with. With better branding, it is a better representation of your company!

Look Good!
Elaborating from our previous post, Let The Brochure Cover Out, the use of images are also of utmost importance. This can be done through a photoshoot, purchase of stock photographs or usage of high resolution photographs from your stock library. If all things fail, we can always rely on illustration as well. The choice (whichever of the above it may be) can be complicated. Again, on numerous occasions, TILT get requests from clients to

download images from the web

use their images (typically embedded in some word document or powerpoint document)

In the former case, this is an infringement of copyrights. While for the latter scenarion, these will result in the loss of resolution. We could say that choosing an image or picture is more complicated than writing the text for the brochure.

The text and images have to be ready before starting with the brochure design.

Brochure Design Form
In the previous section, What’s in a Brochure, we had given some examples of form. To optimise your brochure design, this is one which has utmost importance as well. When your target audience receive the brochure, the sense of sight and touch is activiated. All that we had discussed previously was based on the sense of sight. In holding the physical brochure, we are now touching on the sense of touch.

The type of paper, format and size holds just as much importance as the concept. In using, for example, recycled paper, the design can be very different from designing based on a gloss artpaper. To illlustrate this, perhaps you can imagine a brochure that is to be printed on gloss artpaper to be very colourful. The material allows the colours to be brought out in a vibrant manner. Whereas for recycled paper, perhaps the design can then be more pastal to bring about a more rustic feel to it. Though in the marketing area, there has still not been a thorough investigation about the importance of senses, but through our experience, we do see the trend where a successful brochure usually has the abovementioned elements.

If you ever need a brochure design, do feel free to drop us an email at enquiry@tilt.com.sg. We will be glad to have a chat with you such that the brochure design for your company can be optimised in the end and you can have a successful marketing tool.