How to Design Your Own Brochures

A brochure can set your product or service apart and lead to sales increases.

Advertising and marketing a product can cost thousands of dollars, even millions, depending on the size of the market your trying to reach and the tactics you're going to employ to reach them. For the small business owner or single-product company with a specialized market and a heavy dose of information surrounding the product or service offered, creating a brochure that can be used to help sell that product or service doesn't have to be expensive. A tri-fold brochure can be created that looks professional, contains significant information about what you are selling and can be produced with simple tools.

Things You'll Need

• Paper
• Pencil
• Computer
• Graphics program
• Printer
• Paper stock

Instructions

1. Create a rough of your brochure. To do this, take a regular 8 1/2-by-11 sheet of paper and fold it in to thirds lengthwise. One side of the paper will be your inner panel spread and if you turn the paper over, you'll have the cover, the back and an outer fold over panels. Unfold the paper and, using the paper and pencil, sketch out where you want things to go on the brochure. Because you have to have the panels laid out properly before you print them, roughing up the brochure will help when you start composing the brochure.

2. In your graphics program, create two documents. These will be your comps. One will function for the front side of the paper (or inner-spread panels) and the other document will contain the cover, the back and the outer fold-over panels. If you are skilled with the graphics program, you can create lines to segment each of the panels, which will allow you to properly place things for printing the first time. If you are not particularly skilled, but know the basics of how to drop in text and graphics, you can eye ball it and make corrections later on.

3. Lay out your graphics and text. Often times, when using a program like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign, it's easier to create your text blocks in a word-processing program and then cut and paste it in to your graphics program. Use your rough as a guide for what should go where on your two documents.

4. Place the paper stock, that you purchased for the brochure, in the printer and print out one side of your brochure. The paper stock should be of sufficient quality to hold the ink, not bleed, and look professional when printed upon.

5. Turn the paper over and print out the other side of the brochure.

6. Fold your brochure in the same manner you folded the paper you used for the rough. Make sure that both sides printed out the way you wanted them to and that graphics and copy don't run in to the folds.

Tips & Warnings

• You may have to do some quick thinking when figuring out how to print the layout properly on the printer, as you are basically doing a double-sided printout.