The low-budget brochure - tips for inexpensive desktop publishing

Home Office Computing, March, 1995 by William Harrel

LOOKS AREN'T EVERYTHING. IT'S AN ADAGE THAT APPLIES to design work as well as life in general. When a designer begins work on a brochure, for example, the first thing to be determined isn't how it will look but rather how much money is available for the project. Do you, for example, have the funds to send the project to a print shop? Is there room in the budget for high-resolution, camera-ready output from a service bureau, or will the company laser printer have to suffice?

Today's low-cost desktop publishing programs (Microsoft Publisher, Serif's PagePlus, and Home Publisher, to name a few) and mainstream word processors place powerful publishing tools at your fingertips. Though these products will help hold down the cost of producing your business's promotional material, they can't do it alone.

When you're publishing a brochure on a limited budget, a little knowledge about mass document production can result in a well-received brochure that won't break your bank.

Use Templates If you're like most occasional desktop publishers, you create promotional material, such as the company brochure, in your spare time. And like most people, you don't want to spend all of your free time learning the ins and outs of design techniques. That's why most DTP and graphics programs ship with brochure templates that take much of the guesswork out of the process. Specialty packages, such as MySoftware's MyBrochures ([415] 473-3600), not only provide templates but the paper as well. The templates in any of these packages can shave hours off the time it takes to create a brochure.

The results you get from these programs are often good, though some people worry that using such templates will cause their brochures to look too much like everybody else's. Just keep in mind that templates are merely guides, and you can always modify one by changing typestyles and colors or by rearranging the layout altogether. This takes a little more time, but it's still a lot faster than starting from scratch.

Publish In-House The obvious alternative to relying on an expensive professional output service is to use a laser printer or copy machine for reproduction. This is an adequate solution if you stick with text and monotone graphics, such as black-and-white clip art, but keep in mind that photographs and other grayscale graphics don't reproduce well on such devices.

In addition, the more copies you make, the less cost-effective these methods become. Five hundred copies on a small laser printer, for instance, can wipe out a toner cartridge (which can cost more than $100) and cause considerable wear and tear on the printer. Overall, the important issue is cost per piece, or how much each brochure actually costs to reproduce.

Color Considerations If you're working with a slightly larger budget and plan to use color images in your brochure, then count on going to a print shop. Granted, color ink-jet printers provide some limited options, but the output is seldom good enough to seriously represent a business. Of course, you don't want to go bankrupt just because you're using a professional service, and there are several ways to hold down the cost of getting good color output.

One thing you need to know is that there are two types of color: spot, which typically consists of one or two colors scattered throughout a document; and process, or four color, which is used in full-color photographs and graphics. Print shops typically charge for each spot color you use: Expect to pay about 50 percent more than the cost of a black-and-white brochure for a two-color document, and twice as much for three colors.

To get the most for your money, use percentages of spot colors--also known as screens or tints--in logos and shaded text boxes. Because tints use the same ink that goes into spot colors, print shops don't charge extra. Several programs, including Microsoft Publisher, CorelDraw, even Word for Windows, allow you to create tints.

Process-color brochures run about three or four times the cost of single-color brochures, though the price per document drops considerably as you increase the number of copies printed. But because too many things can go wrong when working with process color, it's best to rum the design of such projects over to a professional desktop publisher.

The most common problem is the color shifting that occurs between what you see on the monitor and what you get on paper. Matching screen and paper output requires monitor calibration, printing multiple color proofs, and performing expensive press checks--all of which are too complicated and time-consuming for nonprofessionals.

Using colored paper is another low-cost alternative for adding color to your brochure. MyBrochures and Nebs's PageMagic ([800] 388-8000) both offer several attractive selections that feature stylized borders and designs that provide professional-looking results--even from laser printers. Independent providers such as Paper Direct ([800] 272-7377) also offer designer paper at a reasonable cost.