Standing out from the crowd means not just having great content, but great presentation. It won’t matter if you have the perfect pitch or the exact product or service that they’re looking for if they never make it past the eye-glance stage. Colour, texture, and even things like font choice can be the difference between someone leaving your brochure in their pile of mail or taking up an offer. Unless you’re artistically minded, though, it can be tricky to have a frame of reference for precisely what constitutes good design. We’ve put together some great examples to showcase what you can do to stand out from the pack.
NYU Stern Skyline Brochure
Featuring a beautifully laser-cut rendition of the New York skyline that wouldn’t look out of place in the background of an animated movie, this brochure for the Stern Business School captures their core message — that they are New York Business, and the only place a prospective candidate should be trying for. Purple and white is a historically prestigious colour combination (the British Monarchy use purple as their regal colour, and Roman Emperors were the only ones allowed to don the purple toga), which certainly adds to the gravitas of their school.
Falconry UAE
Texturing a brochure appropriately does wonders for letting your customers physically interact with your brand; they’ll automatically feel a sense of familiarity based on tactile sensation, and if you’re also on-brand (and a historic, parchment and sealed letter is definitely on brand for Falconry) it’s a simple, if slightly more expensive, way to stand head and shoulders above the competition. Thankfully, UAE haven’t quite just left it at that, making the most of their texturing pattern to, in turn, create a dusk landscape by which they can frame a bird taking flight. Together, they conjure up a feeling of serenity, regality and nobility.
Architecture
Another great example of staying on brand while employing creativity to the design process. What better way to advertise an architect than a constructed brochure? Immediately, without even opening it, you know precisely what’s in store. This is a candidate who has a certain aesthetic and geometric taste, who knows colour and shade, form and function.
A Piece You Can Feel
Again, it’s the texture work, the strong contrasting colours, and use of negative space that bring this to the forefront, rather than the content of the page. It’s tempting to run your hands over the dotted lines on the left-hand page, isn’t it? I guarantee you that when absent-mindedly reading, a large segment of the audience is going to be doing just that (perhaps without even realizing it). We’ve been repeating it a lot, but only because it bears it: texture is vitally important in elevating a brochure from humdrum trash to be discarded (think about how many plain fast-food menus you’ve disposed of, with the absolute most effort having been that they were printed on yellow paper) to something that’s picked up, read, and acted upon.
Espacio Para Disfrutar
Vibrant, colourful, and brimming with life. This brochure expands from a small, eye-catching little teaser picture into a glorious expansion of the neighbourhood (stock text notwithstanding). We’ve hammered home texturing already, but colour balance, and creating the right colour profile for your service, is equally as important in designing a brochure. The first thing that comes to mind here is a healthy community, the sort of place where you could see the same people on the street every day if you were a local, and if you were touring you could at least expect some authentic, amazing food and sights. It’s not trying to establish itself as an old-world paradise, but as a luxurious haven that isn’t too uppity about itself regardless.
Elegance in Simplicity
You don’t have to have a clash of colours or a front matted with fur to stand out, they’re just shorthand for ‘Interesting Design’. It all comes down to market fit, after all. If you’re after people pursuing a holistic lifestyle, or you’re trying to stay up to date with the current vogue of minimalism in interior design and fashion (to name just a couple of sectors where it’s caught on) then it can also make sense to That isn’t to say that the lessons learned by our other pieces aren’t still appropriate. This piece has to work hard to achieve a delicate balance of colour to push its message. Soft whites, layered faintly over with the browns and accents of foodstuff, and with the merest hints of red for highlights work together to create a subtle interplay. The font choice here is also simplistic and elegant, working in tandem with the message. Inside the brochure, we see a little more colour displayed, but still maintaining that same palette, and devoting the maximum amount of room to the images themselves to establish them as the focal point.
