Color Printing

The printed booklet is a staple in the world of advertising when you need to get a lot of information to people. For those whose job centers on them and their knowledge of the field, book printing allows them a chance to let everyone know just how well they know their field.

Booklets are often informational sources dealing with a whole slew of different topics depending on who is writing. When a person picks up a booklet they’re going to be doing so to find out what it has to offer them and what it can teach them more about.

The issue I have is that too many companies aren’t really using the booklet as a form of advertising. They’re treating it like you would a non-fiction book meant only to inform, when a booklet can very easily be a nice venture through the field of graphic design.

Another form of advertising that has a few similar aspects to it is the brochure. Here too is a longer advertisement that usually contains a lot of information. Brochures aren’t as packed in with info as a booklet typically is, and a brochure is going to have more of an emphasis on selling than the average booklet will.

But one thing a brochure shouldn’t have over a booklet is visuals. The full color brochure is the most common style of brochures because of how eye catching it is. You need to take those same visual details and add them to your booklets.

Have images on most of your pages to augment the information given. Have headings with a color backing it to make it stand out from the rest of the text. Find creative ways to highlight certain points, like pulling a paragraph out from the text and adding a colored box around it.

These are all rather basic, easy to implement graphic design details that will greatly improve your booklets. Yes, people are looking at a booklet for information, but they have to be intrigued enough to want to know what that information is.

If you aren’t giving them any worthwhile reason to care about what your booklet has to say than it doesn’t matter how great your information is people will still be hesitant to give it a chance.

No matter how much people might like to believe otherwise, all of us do judge books by their covers some times. If something looks bland and boring I’m often inclined to think that what it has to say is just as bland and boring. It isn’t very fair, no, but I’m still inclined to do it.

Next time you have a booklet made be sure to add in some visual flare. Have fun with it, and come away with a product that people will immediately gravitate towards, and want to flip through.

I’ve talked to people before who had never considered the idea of business cards and graphic design going together. “What is there to design?” they asked with a laugh. “All you have on the card is a name and some contact information. I guess you could say the logo is kind of like graphic design, but that was made long before the business card was.”

Sadly, they have a point. For many people the idea of a custom business card is foreign. All most people ever really see are the standard styles for the business card. I see black lettering on white paper all the time with maybe a colorful logo next to it. But I very rarely see anything other than that.

My question becomes why aren’t people doing more with their cards? Why not have that full color business card that embraces the full color part of it?

I think that the real issue here is that within recent years the rise of home based computer graphic programs has done two things that are quite opposite. The first is that the ability to design very unique and interesting business cards has increased. But at the same time because you have so many different people with things like Adobe Photoshop on their computer at home, they’ve taken to designing the cards themselves.

Now, I have no problem if you want to design your own business card, because I think this adds a level of personality to the cards that would otherwise be lacking. What happens though is that people without design experience go for the simplest form of business card that they can rather than risk designing something harder.

While it might be more difficult to design something beyond the realms that you’re used to, it’s not only good practice, but because business cards are so cheap to print, you won’t be out much money if your card isn’t quite what you want it to be.

The important thing to remember is that a business card is just as much advertising as a brochure or television ad. This right here is the fact people aren’t thinking about when they make those rather bland, repetitive business cards. They’re viewing the cards as nothing more than a means of handing out contact information, and not a means of being remembered.

If a card is going to represent you when you aren’t around, shouldn’t that card be as effective as possible? Don’t you want it to have as much personality in it as you do? Get to work finding something you’ve never seen before, and something that tells people exactly who you are, and I think you’ll find the responses you get to your card will greatly improve. The first time someone looks at your card and exclaims, “That is so interesting looking,” you know you’ve succeeded.

How much thought have you put to the way you fold your brochures? Do you realize what an important element of the brochure this can be, and what a big impact it will have on the person who picks it up and starts reading?

A lot of people don’t realize just how much a fold can alter the brochure design. Whenever you consider any brochure layout the first thing you need to do is look at how the folds are going to be, and create your image accordingly.

What often happens is that when people are designing brochures they see the image only when it is completely spread out, and not exactly how it will be when folded. This creates a false image. Even when folds are taken into consideration, most people only go with a few basic fold patterns to make it as easy as possible to see mentally what the final result will be.

But by doing so people fail to create some very unique custom brochures with folding patterns you don’t usually see in advertising. A more complicated fold pattern also gives you potentially more pages to work with. The folding greatly changes the graphic design aspect of the brochure.

Here are two direct comparisons for folding patters, and I’m guessing you’ve seen both of them at some point.

The first fold patter is often used in restaurants for their menus. It has two flaps on the left and right side that open up into a much larger inner area. Here are the benefits: you can have a much larger, single image or chunk of information in the center of your brochure. If most of what you have to say goes together, or you like a larger amount of images, this folding patter will probably be best for you.

Another style instead folds several times in such a way as to create a mini book that goes from one smaller page to the next. If you have a lot of different points you’re trying to make this will be the perfect kind of folding to use, because it allows you to have a separate page for each point.

You should talk to whoever your printer is to find out exactly what can be done with different shapes and sizes of brochure paper. After all, some folding patterns require a larger more square shape initially, while others need a much longer, narrower rectangle. If the printed size is wrong the brochure will never look as good.

Brochures are one of the more intricate forms of advertising for a reason. Not only do you have to write and design them, but you have to consider how you’ll end up folding them as well. But then again, they’re also a style you can’t really match with any other advertisement.