Tips for Printing your Company Brochure

What you see is what you get; this adage is applicable to brochures too. Brochures are the face of your company, your first interaction and impression to the audiences. You can take help from established printers or you can plan to print on your own. Here are few tips for printing your company brochure which will add a marketing punch to your brochures, provided you put right time and effort into their creation.

• Keep Printing in mind while designing the brochure : It is very important that the final outcome should be kept in mind at the onset stage of brochure creation. Also try some companies that say 48 hour print of your brochures when you need them really urgent.

• Know your print size and type : Always keep your design size in sync with the printing paper. For example, if you use 8.5 x 11 layouts and submit it for printing on 8×10 papers; you will get a bad quality resolution print as you are trying to fit a large image or text to smaller dimensions. Type of paper is significant and should go with printing media options. Visit a paper supply store and check out various finishes for yourself.

• Organize your brochure design on paper first : If your brochure contains folds then it is almost mandatory you design it first on a plain paper. For example if you plan a tri-fold or some other fold, fold up a piece of plain paper and sketch out your design. This will make a clear picture in front of you and you will be able to organize your brochure better for printing.

• Leave margins to allow print bleed : Brochures are printed in bulk and hence a single sheet gets printed which contains several brochures together. Later on a cutter is used to cut this single sheet to separate several brochures. Sometimes, primarily for image intensive brochures solid ink coverage leaves its mark during this process. Hence leaving a margin is a good idea to avoid such print bleed. Also even a slight shift in the blade can destroy the whole design for all brochures. Hence, it is advised to leave 1/8th inch of coverage beyond each edge.

• Check your content properly : Text organization is important. Do check the written content for spelling, factual or grammatical errors before you decide to print your brochures. Format the content and make sure the information is presented in a proper flow which is easy to understand.

• Font styles : You can use those fonts which are most common and everybody else is using or you can look around the web for a variety of free, interesting fonts. It will help your brochure to stand out from the crowd and look very professional at the same time. But make sure your printer medium supports it.

• Resolution : To give it a professional look, your design for print should be of proper resolution. Generally what we see on computers is different from what comes out after printing. Like, monitor are only 72 dpi (dots-per-inch), whereas to get sharp images at least 300 dpi is recommended. For this you can also take help from internet where you can get free high resolution images.

• Recheck the image and message match : Before printing make sure the images you are providing along the messages are relevant and correctly placed.

• Branding : Do you own a brand? If yes, make sure brochure design is in proper sync with it. Those specific colors, logo, fonts and images must be an integral part of your design which represents your typical brand.

• Printing file formats : Printing needs proper formats and your designs should follow those.

• Finishing : To create expensive and rich look, you can consider effects like die-cuts or spot varnish. It will not only highlight images on the cover but keep those fingerprint smudges away. Use aqueous coating if you plan to mail your brochures.

• Print samples and do rack test : Before you print the brochures in bulk, print some samples to get the actual feel of the final product. A rack test is also recommended before going for final bulk printing.

You might be using Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator or Quark Xpress or Microsoft Publisher or some other software but I hope these tips of printing your company brochure will help you to print more professionally and save your considerable time and hence money.