Four Essential Brochure Printing Tips

We’ve put together four essential brochure printing tips to help you make the most of your printing campaign!

Use The Right Colour Profile

Choosing the right colour format for your project can be a mystery for some inexperienced designers or marketing managers not experienced in print design. There is in fact a fundamental difference in the colour format used for digital design verses brochure printing. Web images and computer images use what’s called RGB, or red green and blue to create images. It is a subtractive colour format, as colour is ‘removed’ from the computer screen’s pixels to create new colours.

Meanwhile, paper has no pixels. This means a subtractive colour profile wouldn't work, as there’s no colour to take other colours away from! Instead, colours must be added to the blank page, so an additive colour format is used. This is called CMYK, or cyan, magenta, yellow and key, which is the same as black. These colours must be mixed and added to the page to create new colours.

So why do you need to convert the colour format of your images for print? It’s to ensure colours exactly match what they should look like. Many businesses require certain colours for corporate image, which cannot be changed. Using the right colour format ensures that colour is kept consistent.

What DPI Should You Use?

If you are primarily focussed towards web design, or rarely commission print media, you many not know what DPI, or dots per inch, to use on your project. Dots per inch basically determine the quality of your finished product. The more dots per inch, the higher the detail of your images and text used in your brochure printing project.

Usually, web design used 72 dots per inch. However, printing this out would result in a very bad quality standard. Images would be grainy, while text would be blurred and hard to read. The right resolution for print is 300dpi, over three times the quality of web design. Print must use a much higher standard of quality because there are no pixels. As a result, images appear sharp while text looks clear and defined.

Know Your Purpose

An important thing to consider with any brochure printing campaign is your purpose. How many people do you want to reach? What do you need to tell them? How will your campaign be determined a success or even a failure?
When deciding your campaign’s purpose, consider what is realistically achievable. What have you achieved with past campaigns, and what budget was allocated?

The other thing to consider is how your purpose will be put across in your finished design. Have you included the right information and call to action in your copy text? Does the design appeal to your target audience? Getting these things right is critical to your success.

Know Your Budget

Lastly, one of the most important things you should know before undertaking any kind of brochure printing project, is to know what budget is allocated to it. This is very important, as it can impact everything from the type of paper you can use, the number of copies, and even the designer. You wouldn’t want to create an expensive design only to find there isn’t enough left to produce any copies!

To define the budget, you need to have previously defined your brochure’s purpose. That way, you’ll know where, or if, any cuts can be made, without cutting out anything that’s critical to the campaign’s success. For example if you determined that your campaign would be successful based on the amount of reach it generated, it would be stupid to reduce the number of copies made to cut costs!