How To Prepare Your Brochure For Printing

Brochure printing can be a time intensive task. You have to create your content, make a layout, imagine a design, produce the design digitally etc. By minimizing the time it takes to do the whole process you can concentrate on other aspects of your business, and also you can save costs on hiring staff especially if they are paid by the hour. Time is money as the saying goes. Because of this, we have put together the steps necessary to prepare for brochure printing below. Your experience with brochure printing services should be faster and more productive if you do these steps when going through the whole printing process.

Determine your dimensions
First you need to determine the dimensions of your color brochure. This determines the layout of your brochure design and the size and shape of the paper that it will be printed upon. There are several standard brochure printing dimensions such as the folded letter size dimension (8.5x11) or the more common brochure standard size (11x17). Always set the dimension you want on the image or publishing file of your brochure. This makes it easier for the brochure printing company since they don’t have to resize your brochure design to fit the printing process. This also avoids the hassle of having to re-edit the design to prevent pixels from appearing.

Take note of the folds
When doing your layout and design for your color brochures always take note of where the folds are located. Some people make the mistake in not minding the brochure folds. They think since the brochure will be opened anyway, then it wouldn’t matter where the folds lie. The whole design will be seen once it is open. The trouble with this line of thinking is that some important design elements might be located within the fold area itself. What if an image was caught in a fold area, wouldn’t that wrinkle up the image and make it distorted? If a face or logo got caught up in there wouldn’t that ruin it? Of course if text gets cut because of the fold, then it is downright unprofessional. So always take note of the folds. You can put some digital guide lines on their locations if your imaging software allows it. Or you can actually put in a line or design element within the fold area to mark it.

Brochure Image file settings
Next, always be sure of the brochure image file settings before sending the design of to the printer. First and foremost would be the image resolution. Resolution determines the graphic dots that are present in a digital image per inch. This is called dots per inch or DPI. The printing standard of 300dpi to prevent pixels from occurring applies here. Next, have the correct color settings in your image file. Some printers use the Red, Green and Blue setting (RGB) while others use the Cyan, Yellow, Magenta and Black combination (CMYK). Ask your brochure printing company what color mode they use so that they don’t have to convert your image to another color mode. Lastly, it is better to have the brochure file format in an image software file format rather than a direct image file. This is so that the printing company can make minor changes in your design as necessary without going back to you for the changes. A common file format that is used for digital image design is the Adobe Photoshop file (PDS).

Compensate for printing
Lastly, always allow a leeway or extra space to compensate for brochure printing. This refers to the print “bleed” where your design can go a little beyond the set dimensions. This assures that when the brochures are cut for printing no awkward white spaces or cut design elements appear.

Those should be the important steps you do to prepare for brochure printing. Once you have done with all this the whole brochure printing process should be a snap. Good Luck!




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