Choosing the Right Fonts For Your Booklets
Booklets are not the place to get jiggy with your font. The only exception to this rule is when you are selling a new font. So for everyone else who is not selling the font to end all fonts, let’s get back to the basics. Here are some font tips to remember when designing your next booklet printing project.
Choose an easy to read font – Readability is #1. Arial is a great font with well spaced letters in words and from line to line, such as what you see in this sentence. Script is almost always a bad choice for text in booklets or sales material, as demonstrated in this sentence. Both the Arial and the Script font in these sentences are the same size to demonstrate the readability comparison. There are many others to choose from. If your booklet has a lengthy text passages, try using a serif font to ease eye strain and fatigue.
Use a font to fit your business industry – For headings, use fonts that illustrate your business. Straight sharp-edged fonts for straight-forward hard working businesses, round curvy fonts for light-hearted leisure type industries.
Contrast – In a printing format, a basic white background with black writing is probably sufficient. Since the purpose of a booklet is to get the message out about your product, let your product do the talking and don’t jumble it up with a lot of fancy font.
The Best Way To Incorporate Your Logo Into Your Brochure
An important point to remember when designing and printing brochures for your company or products is that branding helps to establish your identity. A great looking brochure might sell a product, but it may not keep your customers coming back to buy more. A strong brand presence is also important to form and maintain a loyal customer base. Good products and services may go ignored without a strong brand identity.
Why emphasize your logo in your brochure and other printed materials?
It is important to tell your customer about your brand on all your products and communications. Whether it is on receipts, shopping bags, posters or brochures, your logo should be front and center. Some companies have an iconic graphic such as Adidas’ three stripes or a recognizable color scheme. Your logo and other identifying symbols should be used on all your printed materials in a consistent way. Your customer should be able to immediately identify your brand and remember it, so they can look for more of your products at a later time.
Creating a strong brand identity is crucial to maintaining your sales and developing a larger customer base. Great products are often not enough. Your brand’s name and image must be interesting and memorable to the customer. Your logo should cause the customer to make associations in his or her mind. It should stand for something more than just the products. Once you develop a great brand image, you need to make sure the customer remembers it with iconic images and logo designs. The best way to keep customers aware of your brand is to allow them to see your logo everywhere you can put it: in emails, on websites, on printed correspondence, on sales tags, and in advertisements.
How should you use your logo in your brochure?
How To Choose The Right Finish For Your Brochures
There are three kinds of finish you can choose from when designing your brochure printing project. All three offer varying degrees of protection for your carefully laid out presentation. Without a coating, the ink on your brochures would be easily smudged without this added protection. Which one you choose depends on the nature of your product and the purpose of your brochure.
1. Varnish - All printers can apply varnish, which is basically an ink without coloring pigment that can be applied along with your brochure’s colored ink or after. When varnish is applied with the ink during the brochure printing process, the resulting finish is dull. Applying the varnish after the ink in a second pass through the printer provides a much more glossy result. Varnishes can be tinted to add depth of color to the brochure, but they do tend to darken with age. If a particular brochure marketing campaign is short-lived, this is not an issue when making your decision. When applied in a second printing pass, varnish offers the additional option of spot application: using different levels of gloss on certain areas of the brochure to add impact and draw attention. Varnish is not used by most professional printers today because of the high cost. Much more economical and high quality coatings are available today, as explained below.
25 Design Magazines
Every designer, whether a professional or someone who likes to design their own corporate literature, needs to be surrounded by inspiration to keep the ideas fresh. Keeping new tips and tricks of the trade handy is also important, which is why graphic design magazines are such a necessary part of any designer’s library. Print magazines are especially nice to keep around for flipping through during down time at the office, but online magazines also carry lots of ideas for graphic design, both for print materials and web design. Here are 25 of the best graphic design magazines available. Most are printed magazines, while others have both print and online versions, and still others are only found on the web. Browse through them at your leisure and decide which ones are the most necessary for your niche of design. There are so many golden nuggets in this list that you’ll be tempted to order a yearly subscription to most of them, but remember that you can only read so many magazines at once.
Print Magazines
1. The International Design Magazine
This magazine provides lots of articles, inspiration, contests, and more for design in the broad sense of the word and the business world of design.
2. Before & After Magazine
Perfect for inspiration, this is the “how to” magazine for graphic designers with the latest design tutorials and tricks available.
3. Layers Magazine
Another wonderful “how to” magazine, you’ll find everything you need to know about designing with Adobe in issues available on CD and in print.
4. HOW Magazine
Amazing career and design advice are available both online and in print through HOW; as well as contests, inspiration, forums, and events.
5. PRINT Magazine
A commentary on design culture, this bimonthly magazine provides valuable insight into environmental, social, and commercial design.
15 Websites To Get Awesome Icons For Your Marketing Materials
Icons are an excellent graphic for pointing out important information, alerting your audience to specialized info, or to add a visual to break up long blocks of text. In catalog printing, use an arrow icon, for example, to point to special offers. Many logo designs include the use of icons to enhance memory retention of the company. Icons are also great for use on websites as buttons, such as a printer icon that visitors can click on to print the information on your page.
It’s easy to find free icons for use on your website, but you have to be careful when downloading a free icon for use in printed materials, since the wrong resolution will result in pixilated or blurry images, as well as icons that are too tiny to see. When finding icons for print, be sure to download the vector version so that you can resize the icon for your printed marketing materials. Here are the top 10 websites for some of the most professional icons available, along with some tutorials for creating your own.
Bright! A Free Icon Set
There are 148 hand-crafted icons that will look amazing in both print and web designs in the bright collection.
Why Printing Online is a More Practical Choice for Freelance Designers
In the busy, hectic life of freelance designers dealing with a variety of clients while on the road or at home, the last thing that should be laborious is printing. Ordering through online printing companies is simple and companies are continually working to be user-friendly with their client interface features like order entry, order tracking, and help lines. The convenience and versatility of online printing make it a natural choice for the most demanding of consumers. Here are some reasons to use an online printing company for all your printing needs.
Convenience
The challenge of maintaining organized professionalism while working in locations that vary from office to client to hotel to home need not be further aggravated by having to find printing services in all of these locations. Using an online printing company just makes sense. Orders can be placed any time of day or night. Your laptop, or even a hotel computer, with an internet connection is all that is required. Entering your order takes only minutes. Completed print jobs can be shipped wherever you specify. You no longer have to fret about quality and accuracy with an unknown printer when you are in a new area because your online print service follows you!
How to Create an Invitational Postcard Design
A special event is great way to share new products with your customers and invitational postcards are a great way to invite the masses. However, not everyone who receives an invitation will attend your event. This makes the design of the postcard of great importance. Here are a few tips to reference when planning and printing a postcard.
1. Associate the new product with your company
The key to sticking with customers who may see your card but not attend the event is to clearly display your promotional items along with your easily recognizable logo and name. The best way to do this is for both to be on the face of the postcard, i.e. an image of your product display with the company name immediately below, above, left, or right. If your product is not easily photographed, a headline announcing the product along with your logo/name may be a more desirable option. Keep the design as simple as possible to lessen distractions. Remember, your final design should immediately associate your product with your business even at a glance. Format this section as large as you can so that people get the message even if they aren’t paying attention. This is the most important aspect of an invitational postcard printing.
