The Best Brochure Printing Guidelines for Small Businesses

Brochures are one of the most effective ways to get your company’s products and services in the public eye. Not only are they incredibly affordable compared to television, radio, and some digital ads – they are also capable of informing and educating your target audience better than any other marketing material.

However, if your small business brochure printing project isn’t handled correctly, it might actually chase away potential clients and harm your brand image. If you’re not sure about the best strategies for creating a brochure for your business, you’ve come to the right place.

Here are four key guidelines to follow when creating your small business brochures:

1. Choose the Right Size for Your Brochure

Before you set out to create a brochure for your small business, you might want to take a look at samples from other companies in your industry. The best brochures are sized appropriately for both comfort in the hand, portability, and most of all, readability.

You don’t want your brochure to be so small that it gets lost easily or can hardly fit the text on each page. The font should be the right size so that anyone with normal vision can read it clearly. However, going too large in the design phase might create difficulties when you’re ready to have your brochure printed by a commercial printer. Make sure to choose the paper size for your brochure ahead of time so you know exactly how big the design files should be.

2. Ensure Quality Images

The last thing you want for any printed marketing materials is for the images to be blurry or grainy. Brochures are perhaps the most important medium for quality images because you are often displaying your products or other facets of your small business that must be rendered clearly.

When choosing images for your small business brochure, make sure they are high-resolution. The same goes for the text on each page – make sure the font style, size, and color are perfectly legible against the background image. Otherwise, nobody will be able to make out what you’re saying or depicting on the pages of your brochure and all your marketing efforts will have been for naught.

3. Be Mindful of Folds

The majority of brochures, practically by definition, are folded documents with multiple pages inside. The type of fold determines the order in which your brochure readers will absorb the information you present.

Sometimes, you want your brochure to have a fold between each major point of a sequence, especially if you are presenting step-by-step instructions. Other times, you want to segment out different products or services on each page. No matter how you choose to structure your brochure, remember that there will be at least one fold, and sometimes two folds on each page depending on the size of your brochure.

4. Take Advantage of ‘Bleed’

Poorly designed brochures are often immediately apparent due to a white edge around the paper where the image was not large enough to cover. The image may have been poorly formatted, or there may have been an issue with your office printer.

This is why commercial printers usually recommend you extend the design of your brochure beyond the borders of each page. This is called ‘bleed’. When your brochure is printed, the background image, pattern, or color will cover the entire sheet of paper and look more professionally designed.

Have a design ready for a brochure printing project for your small business? Contact the commercial printing experts at Linemark today.