Designing and printing a brochure?

Deliverance

I'm designing a brochure for a company, all my experience so far is in screen based design. I'm not a 100% sure how to create the end files in such a way as to have them suitable for print as an actual brochure which I assume will be sent off to a printers at the end of the day. Can all this be done in photoshop? Or will I need other software packages?

Any advice appreciated, thanks. Ps: Sorry just realised that this should be in 'Digital art and design', feel free to move it.

monkeyfudge

Moved.

If you know Photoshop well then you should be able to do everything you want with it if necessary. Just design to 300 dpi as opposed to 72 dpi. Make sure everything is CMYK as opposed to RGB.

Talk to the printer and find out what they want. Depending on your design you may need to add a 5mm bleed to the thing.

I'm sure more detailed advice will come... I haven't worked as a graphic designer in about 7 or so years.

minikin

No, you shouldn't be doing it in photoshop - at any resolution.

You should start from scratch in a page layout app - indesign or quark.
If you don't have these apps (nevermind an understanding of print design) then maybe you should pass the job on to a print designer.

n.b. you can continue with photoshop and you can get it printed but it'll look cack, the printers will laugh at you behind your back and the end product will reek of amateurism.

I do this full time for a living - I'm not being precious, just trying to put you on the right path.

Poochie05

I agree that it would be better to use a page layout program rather than Photoshop. Liaise with the printer to find out about the settings they need you to use when you save the document. At the very least, 300 dpi resolution is needed for print work. Designing for professional press not as easy as it sounds. When it comes to printing professionally it is important to check with them or your work can end up looking very poor, especially if colours are important. It depends on how you want the brochure to come across. If it is to reflect a quality company, it may be better to get it done professionally. In this case, if you're not experienced in page layout you should pay a designer to do it for you.

Heinrich

You could download this and try it out. If you can get to grips with it then when you finish your project save it as a PDF file which any self respecting printer should be able to work with!

Basically you have a page layout progran to manage your project. Photos are imported and usually display on the screen at 72 dpi for speed. The photos should be minimum 300 dpi for the printer.

Deliverance

Thanks for the help folks, I've downloaded a trial version of indesign and I'm looking at Microsoft Publisher 2007 as well (MS seems to be quite good and easy to use). Another question I have is: Presuming that the brochure / booklet is size A4, should I just make each page on an A4 page or should I put two A4's onto an A3 format for printing?

I presume the latter is the case after taking apart a couple of similar brochures / booklets.
Excuse my ignorence on this I am new to this type of print development and software.

Hank_Scorpio

Nah desiging in photohsop shouldn't be a problem.

As long as you stick to your margins.

I'm not sure how pages you will have. But you'll need two sets of margins, one for the left page and one for the right page. Don't design in spreads. Single pages only.

You'll need to leave extra room on the inside edges of the document, so for the left page design, the right margin should be a little bigger, not the document size, just make sure the text is a little from the right side of the page.

And the same for the right page, make sure the left margin is moved in a bit to compensate.


Text flow won't be easy by any means. As each page will have to be a new document. So you could run into problems there.

But you can probably work around it.

It will take you longer in photoshop as opposed to a free layout program like Scribus.

Make sure everything is CMYK and it is 300 dpi, not blown up from 72 dpi you know you can't do that, original size has to be 300 dpi. If you make the image bigger you are reducing the amount of dpi.

Finally, when done, you can simply save each page as a .pdf rather than an image format.

.pdf will hold both raster and vector objects (only vectors created in photoshop, smart objects (imported vectors) will rasterise to the resoloution of the document).

If it's only a small 4pp or 8pp document then go for it.

Any more than that then you're better moving to page layout apps.

Hank_Scorpio

Deliverance wrote: »

Thanks for the help folks, I've downloaded a trial version of indesign and I'm looking at Microsoft Publisher 2007 as well (MS seems to be quite good and easy to use). Another question I have is: Presuming that the brochure / booklet is size A4, should I just make each page on an A4 page or should I put two A4's onto an A3 format for printing?

I presume the latter is the case after taking apart a couple of similar brochures / booklets.
Excuse my ignorence on this I am new to this type of print development and software.

NOOOOOO, SINGLE PAGES,

Set up your indesign page as Facing Pages, that will give the inside and outside margin, make the inside margin a little larger.

Never design in spreads, your printer will not like it very much.

Make sure you are using bleed too... you can look that up in the help menu and many websites have explanations what print bleed is.

if you need anyhelp you can contact me anytime.

My email is on my blog

http://www.doozler.blogspot.com/

minikin

good luck with the project

Deliverance

Cheers for the advice lads. Spoke to the printers and am working with them throughout the job, they are very helpful and at least I understood what they were saying and what to say to them etc thanks to you guys, thanks.