How to Make a Creative Booklet
Whether you’re looking for a simple way to promote your business, instruct your patients on a new procedure, show off portfolio work or provide information to your neighborhood, consider making a booklet. Booklets may be as simple as a tri-folded single piece of paper or as complex as a multi-page program-style handout. Don’t pay big bucks for a graphic design company to create your publication; create a booklet with your own artistic sense and imagination. Booklets may be as creative as your mind allows, using custom graphics and text to drive your point home.
Instructions
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Determine the software program to use to create the booklet. A desktop publishing program such as Microsoft Publisher or Adobe InDesign offers preset design templates, clip art and extremely user-friendly layout capabilities. A word processing program such as Microsoft Word or WordPerfect may have downloadable booklet templates but offer less user-friendly layout for graphics and text.
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Open the booklet program and select or download the booklet template. Click through the pages to get a feel for all of the placeholder text, graphics and headlines.
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Click your cursor on one of the placeholder graphics to highlight it, then press the “Delete” key on your keyboard, which removes the graphic from the booklet. Replace it with your own by pulling down the “Insert” menu, clicking “Picture” and selecting “From File.” Navigate to your image and double-click the file name; the graphic appears in place on the booklet. Click through the pages of the booklet and replace other graphics with your own.
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Highlight the placeholder text on a page of the brochure and start typing over it with your own information. For a creative way to communicate your point, highlight the text and use the text toolbar at the top of the page to change the words’ typeface to something eye-catching such as Elephant, Papyrus or Gill Sans Ultra Bold, all of which are standard in any computer installation. Plainer typefaces are better for smaller type, and try not to use more than two typefaces in your booklet.
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Highlight a placeholder headline on a page of the booklet, then type your new headline on top of the placeholder text. Consider grabbing your reader’s attention with statistics or questions that apply to them, such as “Art Therapy Relieves 90% of Stress,” “Women Over 40 At Risk for Cataracts” or “First Massage Free!”
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Add to the booklet’s creative design by giving it a background. Keep in mind the background will appear on all pages of the booklet; it will go behind any text or graphics you’ve added. In a word processing program such as Word, pull down the “Format” menu, click “Background” and select a background color or click the “Fill Effects” button for patterns and designs. In a desktop publishing program such as Publisher, pull down the “Format” menu, click “Background” and scroll through the available background patterns or click “More backgrounds” for further options.
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