Brochure Development Advice
or:
How to Create a Brochure
They Will Really Read
Here is a typical scenario: You work for a large organization and you need to have an important brochure produced. You are the expert of the subject area (say, health promotion) and know what messages you need to get across, but don't know how to put it together into a format that will connect with the intended audience.
Here are some tips that help lead to better designed brochures:
Hire a writer if you can. We know that isn't always possible, but a pro writer will give your material a strong voice heightening its impact, and a fresh perspective your readers will appreciate.
Plan it before your write it. After you've done a rough bulleted version of what you need to say, we can take that content and do a wireframe version of your booklet. This is a rough plan that lets us figure out how we want to allocate all this valuable page real estate. One page is assigned to be totally text, while another is assigned to be a break page with a large photo. When we're done we can tell you how many words to write per page, and what images or other resources we will need. This makes designing the book much easier, and reduces the number of revisions.
Clearly structure your content: Of course you have a lot to say, but for it to be presented clearly in a booklet, it needs to be structured in a way that the reader knows where they are. We refer to these chunks of content like this:
- A Head (Usually a major section over many pages.)
- B Head (Main subsection under the A head, may go for a page or two.)
- C Head (Small subsection under the B head, one or two paragraphs.)
Expect a process, and revisions. This is a good thing, really. The first version we show with the complete text we call the 'first complete draft'. Its after the brochure overall look has been designed and we have dropped in all the content and images. Its the first time that you will have seen your content looking completely designed - and it sure looks different than the Word file you have been working with. Content reads completely differently when it appears designed in pages beside photos and graphics. At this point we expect to review everything with you, making major moves of peices of text, swapping out images and adding bits that may have been forgotten at the writing stage.This is also when we can advise what should go where, what needs to be shortened or simplified, or what needs to be made louder.