Good brochure design has to do rather more than look good.

It needs to organise information, hold someone’s attention and communicate what a product, service or business does in a way that’s easy to understand. It needs to feel recognisably part of the company’s brand and, ultimately, give the reader a reason to take the next step.

And these days, brochures don’t necessarily need to end up on paper.

A company brochure might be professionally printed for meetings, exhibitions and sales packs, supplied as a PDF for customers to download, distributed by email or adapted into a PowerPoint presentation for a sales team.

Annual reports, product catalogues, corporate reports and other longer business documents present many of the same design challenges.

The format might change, but many of the principles behind good brochure design remain exactly the same.

What is a business brochure?

The word brochure covers a surprisingly broad range of marketing and business communications.

It could be a relatively simple eight-page company brochure introducing a business and its services. It might be a detailed product catalogue containing specifications and technical data, a sales document designed around a particular service or an annual report combining editorial content with tables, charts and financial information.

What they have in common is that they need to present information clearly and professionally.

That’s why good brochure design is about much more than arranging some photographs and text across a few attractive pages.

It’s information design.

Your graphic designer needs to understand what the document is trying to communicate, who will be reading it and what those people need to understand or do as a result.

Start with the purpose, not the page size

One of the first questions when planning a brochure shouldn’t be whether it’s A4, A5, landscape or square.

It should be: what does this need to achieve?

A corporate brochure designed to introduce a company to prospective customers has a very different job from a technical product catalogue.

A property marketing brochure may depend heavily on photography. An annual report could contain thousands of words, financial tables and charts. A sales brochure might need to make a complicated service understandable in just a handful of pages.

Before considering the design, it helps to establish:

• who the brochure is for
• what they already know about the business
• what information they need
• what the most important messages are
• how and where they’ll receive it
• what you’d like them to do afterwards

Once those things are understood, decisions about size, format, page count and design become considerably easier.

Good brochure design starts with good content structure

One of the designer’s most important jobs is establishing hierarchy.

Not every piece of information can be equally important.

If every headline is enormous, nothing is a headline. If everything is bold, nothing stands out. And if every available centimetre is filled because somebody thought of one more thing that absolutely had to go in, the reader is left to work out the structure for themselves.

Good brochure design guides someone through the content.

Clear sections, headlines, subheadings, introductions, captions, call-outs and carefully considered spacing help establish what should be read first, what supports it and where to go next.

This becomes increasingly important as documents get longer.

A four-page sales brochure might only require a simple narrative. A 60-page annual report needs a much more sophisticated structure so readers can find the information relevant to them without having to start at page one and soldier heroically through to the end.

Design for the reader, not the boardroom

Business brochures have a habit of accumulating content.

Someone wants another paragraph about the company’s history. Somebody else remembers an additional service. Another department wants its own page. Then everyone decides their particular paragraph is the most important one.

Before long, what began as a clear eight-page brochure is threatening to become War and Peace with a telephone number.

The solution isn’t necessarily to squeeze everything in using smaller type.

Ask what the reader actually needs.

A brochure doesn’t always have to contain everything there is to know about a business. In many cases its job is to generate enough interest for someone to visit the website, arrange a meeting, request a quotation or start a conversation.

Leaving something out can be just as important as putting something in.

Typography isn’t decoration

Typography is particularly important in brochure and document design because there’s often a lot of reading involved.

The choice of typefaces needs to reflect the brand, but that’s only part of the job.

Type size, line length, leading, paragraph spacing, headings, captions and contrast all affect how comfortable something is to read and how easily information can be understood.

A product catalogue might need several clearly differentiated levels of information: product names, model numbers, specifications, dimensions, explanatory copy and footnotes.

An annual report could add financial tables, charts, quotations and multiple levels of headings to that list.

Good typography creates order without the reader necessarily noticing how it’s being done.

Bad typography makes them notice very quickly.

Photography, illustration, charts & diagrams all have a job

Images shouldn’t simply be there because a page looked a bit empty.

Strong photography can establish personality, show products, demonstrate services or give a business a human face. Illustrations can explain ideas that are difficult to photograph. Diagrams can simplify processes. Charts can make comparisons and trends easier to understand.

The right approach depends entirely on the content.

For example, a product catalogue containing dozens of products may benefit from consistent product photography and a highly structured layout. I’ve used precisely that approach when designing product catalogues for Go Plastic Pallets, where product images needed to sit alongside dimensions, weights, materials and other technical information.

By contrast, a more promotional brochure may give photography considerably more space and use imagery to create pace and atmosphere.

The important thing is that visual elements are communicating something rather than simply filling space.

A brochure should look like it belongs to your business

Your brochure shouldn’t suddenly introduce an entirely new personality because somebody fancied doing something different.

It should be part of the same visual language as your website, presentations, advertising, social graphics and other marketing.

That doesn’t mean every piece has to look identical.

It means using the established ingredients of the brand – typography, colours, imagery, graphic elements and tone — consistently enough that different materials clearly belong to the same organisation.

I’ve covered this more broadly in How to keep marketing materials on-brand.

A strong visual identity gives brochure design something to build upon. Without one, each new piece of marketing risks becoming another isolated design decision.

Printed brochures still have a place

Digital distribution hasn’t made print obsolete.

Far from it.

A well-produced printed brochure has a physical presence that a file attachment doesn’t. It can be handed to somebody during a meeting, picked up at an exhibition, included with a proposal or left with a prospective customer.

Paper stock, size, binding and print finishes can all contribute to how the business is perceived.

For a brochure I designed for Rush, Witt & Wilson, for example, the project included not only designing the eight-page brochure but managing its print production, including paper stock and special finishes.

Those decisions are part of the design.

A brochure printed on an unsuitable stock or badly reproduced can undermine all the work that went into creating it in the first place.

Equally, expensive print finishes aren’t automatically better. The specification should suit the business, audience, quantity and purpose.

Sometimes a beautifully produced piece on a substantial stock is entirely appropriate.

Sometimes a straightforward, well-printed brochure is all that’s required.

But a brochure doesn’t have to be printed

For many businesses, the PDF version is now just as important as the printed brochure – and sometimes more so.

Brochures can be:

• downloaded from a website
• sent to prospective customers following an enquiry
• included with proposals
• distributed internally
• supplied to distributors or sales representatives
• viewed on laptops and tablets during meetings

This introduces slightly different considerations.

A design created for print is viewed at a predictable physical size. A digital brochure could be opened on anything from a large desktop monitor to a mobile phone.

File size matters too. A 150MB print-quality PDF isn’t particularly useful when somebody wants to email it to a customer.

Interactive elements such as clickable website addresses, email links, navigation and contents pages can also make a digital document considerably more useful.

Accessibility should be considered as well. Adobe’s guidance on PDF accessibility explains how properly prepared PDFs can support features including document structure, alternative text and logical reading order for assistive technologies.

The UK Government also provides guidance on publishing accessible documents, particularly relevant to public-sector organisations and anyone producing documents that need to meet formal accessibility requirements.

In some circumstances, HTML web content may be more appropriate than relying on a PDF alone.

The important point is not to assume that pressing Export PDF automatically turns a document designed for print into the perfect digital publication.

What about annual reports & corporate documents?

Annual reports, annual reviews, white papers, research documents and other corporate publications are essentially more information-heavy relatives of the traditional brochure.

The design principles remain similar, but the emphasis changes.

There may be considerably more copy, multiple contributors, financial information, tables, charts, statistics and different sections intended for different readers.

Good design helps establish order.

Typography and page grids become particularly important, as does consistency. Tables need to be understandable. Charts should communicate data rather than simply make the report look more colourful. Sections need to be easy to navigate.

A professionally designed annual report shouldn’t make important information more elaborate.

It should make complicated information easier to consume.

That’s one of the reasons I describe graphic design as visual communication rather than simply decoration.

Sometimes the most successful design work is the part the reader barely notices – because finding and understanding the information feels effortless.

Can a brochure also become a PowerPoint presentation?

Often, yes – but not by simply dropping every brochure page onto a slide.

A brochure and a presentation may contain much of the same core information, but people consume them differently.

A brochure is usually designed to be read independently.

A presentation is generally there to support someone speaking.

That means a slide containing six paragraphs of beautifully typeset brochure copy is still a slide containing six paragraphs of copy.

When adapting brochure content into a powerpoint presentation design, information may need to be simplified and broken into individual ideas. Charts might need to become larger. Images may take a more prominent role. Detailed supporting information could move to additional slides or accompanying material.

The branding and core content can remain consistent while the design changes to suit the medium.

This can be particularly useful for businesses with sales teams. Instead of producing an unrelated brochure, PDF and PowerPoint presentation, the same core material can be developed into several coordinated pieces.

One set of content can work much harder

This is where thinking beyond the individual brochure can become valuable.

A business might begin with the need for a new company brochure, but the same content and design system could potentially produce:

Printed company brochure → downloadable PDF → sales presentation → proposal material → selected digital graphics

Not everything has to be reproduced identically.

In fact, it generally shouldn’t be.

But photography, diagrams, written content, data and the underlying visual system can all be reused intelligently.

That can make the initial investment in professional design considerably more useful.

It also helps maintain the consistency I’ve discussed in The Complete Guide to Graphic Design for Business: the brochure looks like the website, the presentation belongs with the brochure and the proposal feels as though it came from the same company.

Rather than creating five unrelated pieces of marketing, you’re building a family of communications around the same brand.

What should you give a brochure designer?

You don’t need to arrive with a perfectly prepared design brief.

Working out the best solution is part of the designer’s job.

But the more useful information you can provide at the beginning, the better.

Ideally, that includes:

• what the brochure needs to achieve
• who it’s aimed at
• the content or an indication of what needs writing
• existing brand guidelines
• logos and brand assets
• suitable photography and imagery
• tables, charts or technical data
• examples of existing marketing material
• how the finished brochure will be distributed
• whether printing is required
• approximate quantities if it is being printed
• any other formats required, such as PDF or PowerPoint
• deadline and budget

It’s also useful to involve the designer before every last detail has been decided.

A designer may suggest a different format, page count or way of structuring the information that makes the finished piece more effective – and potentially more economical to produce.

So, what makes a good brochure?

A good brochure communicates clearly.

It has a purpose, understands its audience and presents information in an order that makes sense.

It uses typography, imagery, colour and layout to help people understand the content rather than simply decorate it. It feels like part of the wider brand. And its design takes account of where and how people are actually going to use it.

Sometimes that’s a beautifully printed company brochure.

Sometimes it’s a detailed annual report.

Sometimes it’s a downloadable PDF that will never see a printing press.

And sometimes the same core information needs to work across print, PDF and presentation formats.

The medium can change considerably.

Good communication doesn’t.

If your business needs a professionally designed company brochure, product catalogue, annual report or digital publication, take a look at my brochure design service or get in touch to discuss what you need.