How To Design a Brochure for Your Home Business

Your face is the primary indicator of your personality and it makes a first impression on everyone you meet. Likewise, your home business's brochure makes the first impression about what you offer to your customers. It is very important that you take your time to design it, lay it out neatly, check it, edit it, re-edit it and get it reviewed by your confidants before you finally settle on the design for printing.

1. If you do not have the creative skills, you should get it done by a professional. You may be an expert in your chosen business line, but creating a brochure is a different cup of tea. If you are quite sure you can do it, go ahead. You must have fairly good command over your language, expressions, color-sense, aesthetic sense and creative layout skills. A good command over MS-Word, Photoshop or other presentation software would be essential. If you are not sure, give your ideas, state your expectations and get it done by a friend, an acquaintance or if you can afford, by an expert.
2. Get a well-designed logo. A logo will add pep to your business identity. The logo should be visually attractive, unique and eye-catching. It's wonderful if your logo's shape, the monogram and the art-work are able to indicate your line of business. Again, if you can't do it yourself, get help. Friends with creative minds will be able to help you.
3. Your brochure should have the right blend of contents. The contents should include:
   • A Write-up about the range of your products/ services.
   • Your past experience, your specialties and your unique strengths. If you can list out your good customers for reference, it would be fine.
   • Pictures, photos and illustrations. You can source them mostly from the Internet.
   • The right combination of colors, shades, text fonts and sizes.
   • Your contact information (address, phone numbers, e-mail address, website information, etc.)
4. Do not cram in too much information. You brochure should not be overflowing with words. DO NOT EXAGGERATE your capabilities. Do not write in a flowery language. Be specific and concise.
5. Colors and shades should not spoil readability. Go through as many brochures as you can lay your hands on and learn from them; select the colors that are pleasing to the eye.
6. Important: the black & white photo-copy of the brochure should be nice too. Take a black and white photocopy of your final proof and see whether it is readable and visually decent. Many times, you may go out of print and you may have to give out black and white photocopies of your brochure until you are ready with fresh prints of color brochures.
7. Don't spell out your pricing and rates in your brochure. Why? You will be forced to revise them frequently based on cost escalations, market conditions, competition, etc. Once your brochure is prepared professionally, you may not want to revise it for a long time. Have a separate price-list that you can easily re-print, from time-to-time, off your Inkjet/ Laser Printer.
8. Select the right brochure size. One recommendation is to make it in A4 Size -just 1 sheet - Back-to-Back. (Add more leaves if needed). DO NOT MAKE the brochure multi-foldable. If your brochure is valuable to your customer, they will file it somewhere. When needed, they will read it right from the file. So, make sure that you don't print anything in the file clipping or folding areas of the brochure. The customer should be able to leaf through it and, hence, a foldable design may get stuck in the clip and make it difficult to open and read.
9. Make sure the brochure is free from typos, grammatical errors and generally poor writing. This is the most obvious requirement and needs no further explanation.

Time and energy spent on a good brochure will be worth the effort. A good brochure will do the talking on behalf of you whenever somebody sees it.