Brochures are one of the most effective tools that you can use in order to highlight the products and services that your business has to offer. As compared to business cards, they carry a greater amount of information. Here are some tips that you should follow to ensure that the brochures designed by you leave a lasting impression on the target audience:-
Design
The usual software that are used for designing brochures is either Adobe InDesign or QuarkXpress 9. Both are very costly. However, you won’t require any of these to develop brochures for your business. Though MS Word is not best suited for desktop publishing, yet it will be effective if you have the correct template. You can come across numerous free word brochure templates from HP’s website.
In case you are a Mac user, then you can design your brochures on Apple’s iWork Pages. They come with basic templates, but you will find additional iWork templates on the iWork Templates Blog. You can also make use of Brother’s CreativeCenter website to design your brochure for free.
Printing
If you are planning to print brochures on your own, then it would be wise on your part to use a printer which supports two sided printing. In case you have to print several brochures, it would be a better idea to outsource the responsibility to printing shops.Printers that support double sided printing such as HP Officejet 6000 are best suited for brochure printing.
If you want to find out whether your printer supports duplex printing, then you will need to go to the Printer Properties menu. Once you are there, look for an option named ‘Two sided printing’. If you are unable to find such an option in the menu, then you will have to download more drivers. Since brochures have two sides, automatic duplex printing will ensure that you don’t have to flip over each sheet.
You can also consider outsourcing it to some online print shop. The prices that these shops charge is around $300 for 500 brochures for full color on both sides. However, you will have to pay more for more features-$5 to upload a design or photo, $2 in case you want a PDF version and $2 for a map.Well known printing companies usually ask for a higher printing charge as compared to others. Therefore, plan your budget well before going ahead with the printing process.