Advertisement and marketing used to be considered as luxury and were limited to the big brands in older days. The smaller businesses had little to no access to designing, advertisement or in any way promoting themselves.
But, the times have changed. Everything is digital now. Social media and other online mediums of advertising and marketing have given access to almost everyone.
You don’t need to even hire a marketing agency or even a in-house team to do marketing for you. You don’t even need a huge budget or even a budget to market at all and you need to learn some marketing tips online and get a little of designing. You must especially be good at designing – social media posts, social media ads and brochures for your business.
Brochure design
You don’t need to hire a top brochure designer for a small operation or if you are looking to print only a few of them. You can choose from millions of templates available online and choose from different software to make them. However, there are a few things you need to take into consideration when you do so.
Software
You need to choose the right software when picking where to make your business brochures. The number and type of templates is a key factor you can decide upon. It is also important to know how much customization is available in each of them and if you can, export the final file in a desired format. Check whether there is a limit to edit or uploads or if there is a copyright mark that is included in the design.
It helps if you try to design a rough draft of different software and choose which one was the easiest and the best to give your full efforts on.
Some great Softwares are- Adobe InDesign, Canva, Adobe Illustrator, Scribus, Affinity Publisher & smartdraw.com
Focus of the template
When choosing the right brochure template for your business, you need to focus on a few things like how much information you want to give, how would you like to give that information.
For a travel agency or a photo studio, pictures will be the main part of the brochure and a template which brings the best out of pictures is suitably chosen. Similarly, if you are a content writing agency or a calligraphy or grammar teacher, text will be given the preference and the template with the best font and best text colors will be chosen.
Some great templates
There are a lot of great templates across websites that you can choose from to create a brochure for your business. Some of these websites are design sites and one is simply a brochure designer. Here are some of these great templates you can pick from-
1. Culinary Arts Brochure by smartdraw
2. Contempo Modern Tri-Fold Brochure Template by Lucidpress
3. Bi-fold Brochure by smart
4. Travel Greener by
Design Tips:
Canva
Canva is a software that you can use to design almost everything ranging from a CV to a banner for a display board. It is available in free as well as premium memberships.
With thousands of free templates and editing options, Canva is a tool your business must leverage. You can use this to create great looking creatives for social media, ads and even design brochures.
If you wish to go premium, you also get a lot of photos, elements and premium templates to choose from.
Choose a colour palette
Branding is the part of marketing which gives an identity to your business/brand. It gives a sense of identification to the things that belong to a business.
You can imagine it as presenting a brand as a human. So, if the brand could talk the words would be similar to each other in some sense, the language, the attitude, the tone, something would be common.
So, to do good branding of your business, it is really important to watch out for each type of communication that a business has with the customers.
Your designs, creatives, posts, ads, all your creatives come under that. This makes it really important to keep something similar among them. So, if a person looks at two of the creatives- they can recognise one from the other.
This is where a colour palette comes in. A colour palette is a set of colours that are used for a certain photo/design. It has a few hues and shades and when a business/brand picks up or selects a brand colour palette, all the designs/creatives are made using only these colors.
While choosing a colour palette, you need to focus on the type of audiences that you want to attract, the type of message you want to send out and the type of product you want to sell.
For example- a tailoring business will have a completely different palette as compared to a candy shop.
Use gradients & Layering from Illustrator
If you are learning design for your business to create those premium designs yourselves. Adobe Illustrator will help you take your game to the next level. However, you don’t need to completely master the tool to do so. You can simply learn how to add gradients and use the different layers in the software.
This combined with other simpler tools like Canva, Corel draw and paint can be used to create some really amazing creatives.
Use text wisely
Text in a design is as important as the colors in it.
Text and the design combine to tell the message and if the text goes wrong, the total message is ruined. There are 2 things you must do to make sure that doesn’t happen to you.
1. Choose the right fonts and use them consistently
2. Measure the text- never over or under use text, use it exactly where it is required.
A common mistake small businesses tend to make is give too much information through creatives which is not right.
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