How to Design a Professional Brochure

By: Lynne Saarte
July 01, 2008
When it comes to brochure design, simple is usually better than fancy. Your main goal for your brochures is to create an informative, eye-catching piece of marketing material that will showcase your product to its fullest potential.

Here are 6 tips to keep in mind as you create your next brochure:

Do some investigative research. This isn’t as hard as it sounds! Just collect brochures from your community to study their design. It doesn’t matter where – bank brochures, supermarket brochures – and it doesn’t matter the product, you just need them for research purposes. What kind of layout did they use? What colors worked well together? What kind of photo layout didn’t work well?

Note the ones that you liked and why you liked them. Try to find some common design elements among those you liked and try to use those in your own brochure design.

Keep your purpose in mind while designing. Brochure printing can be tricky – you want to give as much information about your product or company as possible, but yet you can’t say too much. You need to keep your copy focused on the purpose for the brochure – what do you want the result to be after someone looks at your brochure? Are you trying to make people aware of a new product or do you want them to stop by your store to check it out? Use words that encourage people to take the action you want.

Don’t clutter your space. Don’t use a lot of boxes or lines to separate your text. If you use too many, your brochure will look cluttered and the elements will lose their effectiveness. No one will want to take the time to figure out what’s important – the boxed information or the non-boxed information? Design your brochure so that it’s easy to tell what should be read first.

Use “white space.” White space refers to any space on your brochure that doesn’t have text or a photo or some design element in it. Don’t be afraid to leave space in your brochure. This helps it not look cluttered and gives eyes a needed break when browsing your brochure.

Use complementary colors. Use colors that look good together. Ask your brochure printing company for help on complementary colors. They should have a color wheel for you to look at that will tell you what colors work best together, and the company may be willing to print a few sample brochures for you using different color schemes. Also, be sure to only use two or three colors – just because you’re printing in color doesn’t mean you have to use every color in the rainbow. Too much color can be a distraction.

Select the right paper. Paper is available in all colors, sizes and textures. Consider using recycled paper if recycling jives with your business. Nowadays with “green living” being so popular, many customers may pick you over your competition just because you use recycled paper! However, recycled paper usually costs more than regular paper, so make sure your budget can handle it.

Another paper quality to consider is whether it’s slick and shiny or matte and not shiny. Neither is better over the other – it depends on the focus of your brochure.


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