Global Speed is actively involved in trade shows and exhibitions in Japan. Although we attend mostly as visitors, there are several events throughout the year where we might operate a booth or otherwise exhibit our services.
As we are a company that does a lot of printing, we need our marketing materials to properly represent the quality that we produce. Our design team recently came up with a new brochure. In this post, we’ll look at the design and go over some of the reasons why we chose to go with it.
- Physical attributes: half-fold, scored, 210mm x 210mm brochure on 148 gsm (100 lbs) gloss cover
- Audience: visitors at trade shows and conferences, who might or might not know anything about printing or translation
- Distribution: Only in Japan, to be distributed by hand
The brochure is unique in that it is a square shape with a half fold (instead of tri-fold). We chose a this for several reasons:
- Having two interior pages works well in that our services can be roughly grouped into two categories: print materials production and associated services
- It allows us to print on thicker paper
- The shape is more eye-catching and stands out in a sea of tri-fold brochures
- A printing company should have a brochure that speaks to its own strengths (in this case, our ability to produce high-quality materials)
Images
With 210 square mm of space, you have a few options:
- use 1~2 images of select products
- use 4~6 smaller images (perhaps in a collage)
- skip images and list products instead
Although many designers would have gone with more visuals, we opted to use one image and a watermark. The purpose of the brochure is to give a broad overview of Global Speed’s offering. There isn’t enough room to give every service area a visual representation without making things look crowded. We also felt that the layout itself was visual enough that no further images were needed.
Text
The word count of first page is 217 and the second page is 152, for a total of 369 words over a space of 420mm x 210mm. That’s 0.585 words per square mm. By contrast, a tri-fold brochure is usually 300mm x 230mm with a suggested word count of 350 (0.660 words per square mm).
So the word count is a bit low given the area, but this does allow for a more spacious look and feel. With four service areas summarised on two pages, there is already going to be a lot of information. By keeping the word count down, we felt that we could retain the reader’s attention and let him find pertinent information quicker.
