Making More Exciting Brochures with Some Surprising Design Concepts

 by Colleen Davis

 Let us make your brochures more exciting. These days, you will need to surprise and excite your readers with your color brochures. Competition is tough really, and the best brochures are the ones that bring in the most creativity and innovation into the table. So for your brochure's sake, you should listen to these five very interesting, effective and of course surprising design concepts for commercial brochures.

1. Enlarged and super sized brochures - Large brochures are exciting. Why? Well because large brochures offer a large possibility of learning, content and excitement. People cannot resist something very large, especially if it is a brochure with full color pictures that are large and appealing.

So if your goals are to excite and attract readers to reading your color brochures, you might want to just go for super sizing them. Believe me this works in most cases and the overly large brochures can really make an impact on a market.

2. Super-minimalist design concepts - You can also try another very surprising approach to color brochures. You can use a super minimalist design concept. With all the other very exciting and intricate type of designs used today for color brochures, many readers will be quite shocked and surprised at a brochure that is just too minimal and simple for comfort.

By just using a simple block or subtle gradient color with your brochures and then using simple un-enhanced fonts and block pictures, you can a good minimalist design that is actually quite appealing. People will appreciate this simple approach, something that might look fresh and exciting when compared to the crowded and crazy designs as of late.

3. Advanced brochure mimicry - Another cool trick to use is to go for advanced brochure mimicry. You can basically make your custom brochures look very exciting and memorable by making it look like something else. For example, you can make it look like a plank of wood, or maybe you can develop a design that makes it look like a wallet, a mobile phone or even a small computer tablet.

Whatever the gimmick and the situation, your brochures with mimicked designs can really be interesting and exciting for most. Some may even keep your brochures as a novelty item since the design is interesting. So if you want to try something a bit different, you might want to for advanced brochure mimicry when you can.

4. Exotic material use - You can also opt for the use of very exotic materials. From standard paper, you can go and choose something more substantial and exotic. For example, you can use very thick textured paper to make your brochures look more robust.

You can also try using metallic inks and embedded reflectors to make the brochures shine and reflect the light. This of course makes your brochures really formidable and exciting at the same time. Just make sure that you use those exotic materials though in the right way and sparingly.

5. Alternative shapes and folds -Lastly, you can try to make waves with your brochures and use alternative shapes and folds. Everyone will be staring at those brochures that just don't look like the typical trifold brochure. With different configurations and fold elements you can really make waves, impress readers and of course make your prints a little bit more memorable than usual.

Great! Why don't you start trying some of these out? These are very easy enough to do and of course you'll reap the benefits easily with your markets becoming more excited and engaged with your color brochures.



For more information, you can visit this page on brochure printing

Article Source: http://www.articlesphere.com/Article/Making-More-Exciting-Brochures-with-Some-Surprising-Design-Concepts/268943

Illustrator For Fashion

 by Tom Gillan

 Fashion Illustrators the world over use Adobe Illustrator for creating vector artwork for professional fashion and accessory production. The main applications are in creating patterns for garment design and for producing repeat prints in textiles manufacturing.

The program is used at all stages, from creating the initial conceptual artwork to producing the finished pattern line art which is then exported to CAD software. In addition Illustrator is used to construct mood boards or story boards complete with colour-ways. The program's versatility extends to the creation of flyers, posters and even multi-page brochures.

These processes involve working with Illustrator's various drawing tools, as well as modifying existing drawings, and importing photographs and sketches for tracing over. Repeat prints can be created from scratch, or using existing fabric swatches. Colour libraries like Pantone swatches are often used, and can be loaded into Illustrator's own interface. Text and dimensions may be added to the fashion images, as well as company logos and ornate borders. Artwork is finally out-putted for print media or web.

The first step in the whole process is sourcing of images, either from photographs or concept sketches. We then create a new Illustrator document specifying various art boards- these are basically multiple pages, but can be of various sizes within the one document. We then import our sourced images into the Illustrator file using the Place and Template functions. Using the latter option creates a locked, semi-transparent layer which shows our source image, together with a blank drawing layer on top. The locked layer may be unlocked in order to scale or move or rotate the image, then locked again.

The drawing layer having been made active we would then use a variety of tools to draw the garment, for example. It is common practice to create a vertical non-printing guide dragged from the vertical left-hand ruler using the Selection tool, to half the garment - in this way we simply draw half the garment and reflect it to create the other half. One popular method is to use the Pen tool and simply click around the subject creating a very blocky version of the garment. We can then switch to the Anchor Point tool in order to add softness or plasticity to each corner point.

Alternatively, we can use the Pencil tool - this has been improved a lot in the last few versions of Illustrator. Double-click on the Pencil tool to reveal the tool's options. Move the Smoothness slider all the way to the right, to give the smoothest possible interpretation of your line - this will iron out any shaky irregularities in the lines drawn.

Having drawn half of the garment we then select it with the Selection tool, and double-click on the Reflect tool - this will open up the dialog box for this tool. Tick Preview to see the result, and choose the Vertical reflection option. If happy with the result we then hit the Copy button. The two halves of the garment can then be realigned and the top and bottom anchor points joined together. In this way we have a complete object which can later be filled with a Fill colour or a repeat print.

The various garment details are then created in a similar manner, before adding text and colour-ways, and finally exporting the Illustrator file as a PDF to send to a client.



Tom Gillan has been training Indesign to corporate clients in Sydney for seven years. You can learn more about Adobe Illustrator Courses at Design Workshop Sydney.

Article Source: http://www.articlesphere.com/Article/Illustrator-For-Fashion/398375