Brochures and Your Typical Freelance Cartoonist

Your typical freelance cartoonist survives on skill alone. He works for magazines and advertising agencies and increasingly for websites that are looking for some fresh ideas. But in an age of companies being bought and sold, it often happens that personal connections are interrupted or completely severed. Bill, one such freelance cartoonist, saw the handwriting on the wall and decided he needed to take action before all of his connections were lost.
He decided to call on someone they knew who might be in a position to advise them: a salesman at a full service printing company and who had helped them in the past. They ran into him by chance, and they invited him over to visit them in their location. After listening to their concerns and understanding their situation, he came back to them and recommended a brochure.
First of all, the illustrations could be done by the cartoonist himself. Or he could use it to showcase his best work. The next advantage would be that it could be mailed or put into a rack somewhere or taken to trade shows. There was a variety of ways that the brochure could be distributed, but with all of the various contact information available on it, a brochure campaign would ensure that it would get into the right hands on a consistent basis.
How do you even know that anyone will want to open your brochure and read it?
The point is that the cover has to grab the reader and make her want to see what it's all about. To that end, the front panel design is everything. And so the front panel has to be more than just 'clear and concise' - it has to be compelling.
Take your front panel design and pin it on a board. Ask someone unfamiliar with your project to stand five feet away from your front panel and take a quick look - no more than five seconds. Then ask that person to face you and tell you any of these:

• what the subject matter of your brochure is
• what question(s) you're trying to answer
• what your point of view is

If your "guinea pig" can't tell you the anything along these lines, you have a problem and it's "back to the drawing board".
A compelling front panel can take the form of a question, an image, or a statement, or a combination of any of these.
When we talk about the concept of 'clear and concise', it's important to note that we don't necessarily mean text in every case. A brochure is a great place to practice the idea of 'a picture is worth a thousand words'. In so many cases, a simple graph or chart can illustrate an idea much better than a paragraph of two hundred words can.
An extremely good communicator could probably explain Einstein's theory of relativity in a well-designed brochure. Because when it comes down to it, a topic as complex even as that can be reduced to a dozen images and a couple of thousand words of text. Maybe not an 8.5 by 11 brochure, but certainly a 17 x 25.5.
If you want to think of a brochure in terms of basic concepts, think of what all newspaper reporters learn practically the first day on the job:

• Who - are you addressing the right people and do they know your product is for them?
• What - are you clear as to exactly what products or services you are offering?
• When - is there a special opportunity they need to know about in order to take advantage of it in a timely manner?
• Where - how can they obtain these services: internet, retail establishment or both?
• Why - make the case that your product is needed. Everything follows from that.

Put a QR code on the brochure. Advertisers almost always overlook this approach because brochure s are so inexpensive to produce. What they may not realize is that QR codes are extremely cheap also: they add very little to your costs. QR codes are just images and they can be printed onto your brochure the same as any other image. The double advantage of the use of QR codes is that people can use their smart phones to scan the codes and then they are connected to your website. This is even better than the tear offs discussed above, for the simple reason that tear offs can be misplaced but a QR code goes right into your smart phone.
Other considerations in designing your brochure:
Eyestrain: increase the font size for older customers. It's a fact that nearly half the population is over forty-five years of age. And it's at age forty when eyesight starts to deteriorate. Your graphic artist or advertising whiz kind may be a lot younger than that, and he or she may have not given this issue a moment's thought.
Brainstrain: related to the issue of readability is the idea of comprehensibility. That just means that anyone in your targeted audience ought to be able to read and understand what you are trying to tell them without having to go and find a dictionary or other reference source.