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Create a marketable brochure. And now for something differentAll of the business and organizational documents you are learning about in this class are directed at colleagues or supervisors in the same business or organization you are in, except one: the brochure. The brochure definitely draws upon different talents, and there are some students (maybe not most) who really enjoy getting to use their visual skills, their sense of design, and their interest in doing attractive things with Microsoft Word and images. The brochure is directed at people outside your business or organization in order to encourage them to use the product, location, services, or advice you and your colleagues offer. It is, frankly, an advertising document, although often presenting the “story” or advantages of organizations that don’t sell a product. So why an advertising document when the 7 other documents you write in this course are directed to business or organizational colleagues? Because the brochure allows you to engage page design in a way that the other documents more or less hint at but really don’t engage. In the brochure, for instance, you are expected to use color — but not in the other documents (except in a logo or letterhead or graph/chart). The brochure requires you to use columns and spacing in a way that most of the documents don’t, and requires you to insert supporting images in a balanced and pleasing way. Some of what you learn in producing the brochure may be applicable to larger documents such as the Project Recommendation Report. There will be times when you will want to insert an image into a memo, create columns in a resume, and work with boxes in proposals and research reports. The brochure is a single document that includes many of these design elements and gives you practice in using them.So what constitutes this brochure?The brochure, as managed in this class, consists of 6 vertical “panels” that describe in lively text and images some product, event, service, organization, or advice that you may (or may not) personally relate to. This could be a restaurant, a park, a cosmetic product, a daycare, a business service, a pet-care service or product, advice about taking care of yourself, a diet, a dating service, a sorority, an athletic team, a kind of beer, a sleep-aid, a video game — you get the idea.These “panels” are the digital equivalent of the front and back of a single sheet of typing paper folded into accordian-like thirds in a such way that they resemble the typical brochure you are given in gyms, yoga classes, church, or handed out on the street. The idea is that one page of typewriter paper is printed on both sides so that when the paper is folded into thirds, as I say — in accordian style, the reader encounters three vertically long panels: three on the front side side and three on the back side. In my brochure video I demonstrate this if you are still dubious about what I am talking about. In order to produce an effective brochure, you must think in terms of this trifold arrangement: three on one side with an introductory panel that would be the first panel visible, and three on the backside. But each panel has a role to play, and you should follow the following scenario as you prepare your brochure.The Brochure PanelsThe introductory panel should be, normally, the top, right-hand panel. When the page is folded into threes, accordion style, this panel should appear on top. When someone hands you a brochure, this is what you see first, and as a result, performs a lot of the work of the brochure. If it doesn’t appeal to the reader, the brochure never gets opened. Here is where the “rhetoric” I mentioned earlier in the class comes to bear. Here, in this introductory panel, you must grab the reader and make him or her want to open up the brochure to see what other goodies are inside. A dull, colorless, introductory panel simply gets the brochure tossed into the nearest trash can. A colorful panel with appealing visuals can invite the reader to open the brochure.If you play with folding a single sheet of paper into vertical thirds, you will see that when a brochure is opened, it goes normally to the panels on the back side of the sheet, read left to right. Again, to get the process right, you should get a sheet of paper, fold it into thirds vertically, and see how the introductory panel — which is the right-hand panel of the top side of the sheet, opens into the three back-side panels. If you don’t actually model a sheet of paper like this, most of this discussion may get confusing.Now, to preclude some objection to what I just wrote — “but when I open the ‘brochure,’ I go to the other two panels on the top of the sheet.” Sure, but most people will open a brochure like a book, turning the top-right panel to the left and exposing the three panels on the back side of the sheet. So we’ll act like this is a normal activity simply in order to provide guidance on the role of the panels.Figure 1 shows what I hope is a clarifying diagram of the usual panel arrangement. Figure 1Panel #1 is the introductory panel, the first one the reader sees. When the reader opens the brochure (as shown in Figure 2 below), the reader sees the back side of the “sheet of paper,” notably, panels 4, 5, and 6 in that order. Panel 4 would be on the back side of panel 6. Usually what you would find in panels 4, 5, and 6 Figure 2are images and text describing the advantages of using the product, visiting the location, using the service, or following the advice (medical, purchasing, consuming, etc.). Panels 4, 5, and 6 might be described as the “discussion” part of the brochure (as in the “discussion” section in a memo). Here is where the principal argument for the value of the product, location, service, or advice is made. On the front side (panels 1, 2, and 3), panel 2 is most often used as the contact panel, giving a telephone number, email address, location, hours of operation, and any other restrictions or offers (“children eat free on Saturdays,” “pool is closed on Sunday,” “park trail is moderately difficult,” etc.). Panel 2 is the “necessary information” panel.Panel 3 can be used for customer testimonials, honors or awards, special mention, years of operation and service, and so forth.As you can see from the examples in my video on the brochure, some very good brochures don’t follow my suggestions for how the panels should be used, so if you have a reason for using your panels in some other fashion, go ahead. I’m simply providing a guidance for the “most likely to succeed” panel arrangement.Specific Advice on the BrochureThe overriding advice on creating a brochure is to make it attractive, but a lot of “making it attractive” can be accomplished by following some specific guidelines. Here is the list that I included in my video, but I do want to emphasize some of the steps. Figure 3ColorFirst of all is color. I would recommend no more than 2 or 3 colors, and the colors need to work together to present a pleasing aspect. Some of the more “unfortunate” brochures I have received have used bright red and black together, which doesn’t work well unless you are recommending a survivalist camp. Bright yellows and greens can also be shocking in combination. It’s difficult for me to eliminate some colors and color combinations altogether because so much of the color choice is subjective, but play around with the colors in order to develop what might be called a “sense of color decorum.” Headings should all be of the same color as other headings of the same font size. Subheadings should be the same color as other subheadings of the same font size. And your normal text should be the same font size and color throughtout. This I call “the rule of consistency,” in which you keep similar categories of text the same font size and color.But all three — headings, subheadings, and text — should be of colors that stand out against your background color. (The following examples are from student brochures.)Figure 4: Excellent use of color contrast.Figure 5: Okay color contrast. Text slightly fades into background.Figure 6: Shifting colors.This last example (Figure 6) is certainly attractive, but in spite of strong colors it is overcome a bit by all the white space. The left panel (panel 6) handles the text-versus-white space well, but the right panel (panel 4) has big white-space gaps throughout the panel. In addition, you will notice that heading with similar sizes use different colors, which goes against “the rule of consistency.” To some degree the brochure, which earned an A, gets away with the various colors in the headings because of the vibrant color contrasts in the four images: the colors in the headings reflect the variety of colors in the images, a very nice match up.Font SizeNormally you would have three font sizes: normal for text, slightly larger (and bold) for subheadings, and slightly larger (and bold) for headings. That’s it. Nothing larger except for your introductory panel, the “title page” of your brochure. Too many font sizes create a “jumble effect” that blurs any sense of coordination or consistency. (The same is true, of course, of too many colors.) The font itself should remain the same throughout the brochure. Usually a “clean” font like Arial works well.Margin ConsistencyIf you notice, all three of these examples maintain a margin consistency. That is, the top and bottom margins are the same or close to being the same across all three panels. Even in Figure 6, which has an image in the bottom of the left-hand panel (a heart-shaped fruit display) which almost stops too short of the bottom margin is saved by the orange bar across the bottom three panels, giving a sense that the bottom margin is the same. It is slightly cheating, but it works.Border ConsistencyEven though the chances of you actually printing out these brochures on typing paper and folding them into a paper brochure are slim to none, you must still create in your digital brochure a concern with how the panels would have displayed if you actually printed them. That means that the panel widths must be absolutely the same and nothing in one panel should bleed over into another panel. So you should take care that panel widths are the same and that the border between them is consistent.The exception to this is if you want to have an image cross two panels as in Figure 4. This is a dramatic effect, but it should be limited in most cases to a banner-type image and heading or motto across the top and not fully merge two panels into one. Although there are no lines separating the panels in Figure 4 as there are in Figure 6, there is enough space between the panels to keep the borders clean.The brochure in Figure 4 looks quite professional. I asked the writer (an A+ student) how she created the effects, and she proudly emailed me a detailed description of the steps she used with Microsoft Word (!) to produce the brochure. It reminded me of, when a student really “gets into it” and enjoys the creative process, the possible quality of the final product.What software do I need?Any word processing software and image capturing software will work. I recommend Microsoft Word and some screen/image capturing software (usually your computer operating system has this capabilitiy — in Windows 10 it’s called the “snipping tool.”) Some students come up with fancier software that makes creating outstanding brochures fairly easy, but the basic word processing and image processing tools will do. Email me if you have real problems with the software side of things.Spending Time on the BrochureThis assignment takes days to complete, so of all the documents you will produce this semester, this is the one you shouldn’t put off until the last minute. And please, don’t just grab a brochure off the Internet. It’s easy for me to disciver that you have done this, and I will expect changes between the draft and the final version, and it will be difficult to manage that from an image capture.Quiz on Assignment: Brochure (Draft)Records show you have already taken this quiz and answered 5 correct out of 5.