What Not to do When Designing a Brochure

Is print dead? That’s the question on the lips of many marketers. For local business, utilising the digital sphere for audience outreach and lead conversion is becoming increasingly important, and the tide’s not waiting for those dragging their feet. And yet, in this technological world, there remains space for print marketing – and with design being a crucial, indeed central, part of it, we’ve put together a list of what not to do when designing a brochure.

 

Bi-Fold Doors brochure design
Bi-Fold Doors brochure design

 

Forget Your Audience

You’re not designing this brochure to convince yourself that your business is great. It’s a classic example of the saying ‘preaching to the converted.’ Your marketing print needs to have an audience in mind right from the get-go so that it is entirely focused on presenting them with what they want, need and will respond to. If you’re a boutique lipstick company, you probably aren’t trying to get middle-aged men through the door. That being the case, don’t make your brochure look like a sports mag. Brochure design should follow an archer-like process: Aim, Draw and Fire. So what don’t we do? Forget our audience.

 

Stray From Your Brand

There’s a reason that companies, both large and small, need a brand. It’s the same reason that fashion icons have a certain look and musicians have a genre – people recognise them by that and they gain loyal following through it. Certainly there are cases where these rules are transcended but the chances are this doesn’t apply to your company. Therefore, make your brand represent your business and stick to it. Your marketing should flow seamlessly from print to web to bricks, and this involves everything from fonts to colours. What don’t we do? Stray from our brand.

 

Clutter The Page

If you walk into a crowd at, say, a festival, chances are you can’t immediately pick out your friends from a thousand strangers. Why, then, would we hide our company’s message behind a group of needless distractions? If your selling point is ‘Need a plumber? We’re available 24 hours a day’, don’t put that somewhere on a page with a dozen pictures and 3 paragraphs of text (unless you’ve got a great designer who can make it work!). Put it on its own, drive home the message. Keep your pages simple and direct your audience’s attention to what you want them to see. What don’t we do? Clutter the page.

These are just a few pointers, but the most important thing to bear in mind when designing your print marketing is that your company has a brand, a message and an audience. Even if you don’t follow the rules above, make sure you remember to think about the importance of the way you design your material. Print isn’t dead, not by a long way, but it does need to be done effectively to cut through a digital world.