Setting Up Your Template: Brochures

" If something works, why not use it again? This is the mentality behind setting up some strong brochure templates for your company.
What exactly is this? You set up the layout, type of folding pattern you plan on using, and what kind of details are going to go on what page of the brochure, and you use this as an outline for future brochure printing jobs. Odds are good the first templates most companies get are those based on successful brochures of the past.
But what if you’ve never made a brochure before and you still want to start up a strong template for future use? Well here are some tips to make your brochure templates work right from the beginning.
The first thing to consider is the type of folding you’re going to use for your brochure. This decides how many pages you’ll have to work with, and usually how picture heavy or text heavy the brochure will be. This is very important for a template, because a very picture heavy template will of course only be useable if you want all your brochures to be picture heavy.
If you aren’t sure what your brochures will focus on, try to find a folding method that works well to balance out both pictures and text, or gives you the freedom to replace one with the other if needed.
Along with this comes the actual layout on each page. Here you have a little more freedom, but if you don’t want all of your brochures to look exactly the same, you should design them in such as way so that either words or text can go in a certain box.
The layout is essentially composed of multiple boxes, each of which can have whatever you want go in them. But you can have some of them going down the sides of the pages, or across the top, and others set inside the middle of the page. You can have smaller boxes meant for the quotes you plan on pulling out of the text, or those same boxes can be used for a picture that will help emphasize the text.
The best way to get a strong feel for what you can accomplish with various brochure templates is by looking at ones other people have already made. After you’ve started on yours, just try looking at finished brochures companies have made and try to see where the origins were. This is a good way of helping yourself develop a sense of what your brochures will look like when they’re finished.
I’m not going to claim it’s easy to design a great template for a brochure. Given the complexity of this particular form of advertising, getting them just right can be a hassle, and that’s why when you do develop a strong one you should do everything you can to get the most out of it.
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