Over the last decade, marketers have watched as their industry has been turned upside down. According to research compiled by Hubspot, Digital media consumption increased 49 percent - and that's just since 2013. The small business marketing professional must stay in tune with marketing buzzwords, changes in SEO, data analytics, graphic design trends and new disciplines so they stay in the marketing game.
Brochures are one of the most versatile and prolific marketing media in print today, but often times when we go about creating a brochure for our product our thinking can be a bit limited. Many of us tend to jump immediately to the popular Letter Fold (Tri-Fold) format. Although this is a great format, there are many others that may just be a better fit for your message. So what are the different kinds of brochures? Let's have a look.
Ever need to nail something in with the flat side of a wrench? Word Online is definitely not the recommended tool for doing high-level graphic design, but sometimes we need to work with the tools (and the budget) that we have. So to help you with that, I'm going to show you how to create a trifold brochure using Microsoft's free Word Online tool. If you have the Adobe Creative Suite, I recommend you have a look at our InDesign tutorial.
Newsprint is a highly-economical non-archival paper that best-known for its widespread use by news publishers, high-frequency magazines, classified publications, handbooks, phone books, textbooks, journals, guides, manuals and a variety of other common print products. Despite the recent decline in print publishers, newsprint is still widely used in many modern print applications.
There's no doubt that the tri-fold or letter-fold brochure is one of the most popular brochure formats we see being used today, but one format that tends to get overlooked is the z-fold brochure. In this tutorial, we'll be looking at the basics of how to create a z-fold brochure in Adobe Illustrator CC. But first:
At Casey Printing, we always try to bring you the best tips, best practices, advice and industry information, but every now and again you need to break it back down to the basic 'how to' tutorial post. So today we're going to go over the basics of how to create a trifold brochure in InDesign.
Before we get started, download the trifold brochure InDesign template and follow along. You may also want to reference our 10 Pro Tips for designing a brochure that gets results.
Working as the Creative Director in a print shop like Casey, I have been a first-hand witness to every kind of file submission known to man, from PDF to Publisher, created by every production method, from professional design firm to a friend with a Mac. All of them have one thing in common: best value at the best price. Unfortunately, sometimes “going cheap” can cost you a lot more than you think. So in an effort to uncloak the hidden costs associated with designing on the cheap, I bring you this week's Casey Connect.
OK we've all done it. You have an image you really want to use for your website, blog or print project but it's either too tall or too wide. Still, you really want to use it, so you force it to fit anyway by using the Free Transform tool in Photoshop, or Fit to Frame in InDesign, or one of the many other image resizing tools out there. It fits, so your perfect layout is not compromised, and you go happily on your way. Soon the feedback starts: "Why does his head look like a football," "Why do I look so fat in that picture," "Why does she look squished?" That's when you realize somethings wrong.
You've had an attack of the Lemonheads.
When it comes to images, JPEGs are the undisputed king of the hill. With roughly 70% of websites using JPEGs and most digital cameras and camcorders, including the ones on smart phones and tablets, JPEGs have a huge market share on the Internet and with electronic devices that use images. The advantages of this file format, particularly on the web or devices with limited internal memory, is that they offer a decent image quality with an impressive reduction in file size.
So why doesn't your printer like them? Why do they roll their eyes and make a face at the mere mention of this useful and nearly ubiquitous file format?
One of the most common mistakes that people make when they are preparing images for print is that they incorrectly size their images. Making sure that your image's size and resolution match is one of the easiest ways to ensure that your project will look its absolute best.
When you are preparing pictures for publication, it is important to think about how it will be reproduced. The two different methods that I usually use are print and internet.
Images destined for the internet are simple. Computer screen images are made up of little red, green, and blue dots that are placed right next to each other. There are 72 rows of these dots per inch, and therefore a 72 dpi image is sufficient for the web, or any other graphic that stays on your computer.
