Designing a Tri-Fold Brochure

We return to our regularly scheduled Publisher tips and trick to bring you pointers for creating a brochure in Publisher 2007. Similar steps can be used for earlier versions of Publisher.

Printed materials are an excellent way to communicate information. A well-developed brochure for advertising a product or communicating a message to a specific audience can be designed to be cost effective as well as practical.

The size and shape of your brochure may vary depending on desired aesthetics and function. You may be as creative as you like. Your only limitation is the size of the paper you are going to print on and folds for your intended margins. The most common type of brochure is the tri-fold. If you have a tight budget and a small format printer you may be limited to a traditional tri-fold style on 8.5x11 paper.

 

These are samples of traditional tri-fold brochures. Concepts are shown for a cover, the front, and back views of tri-folds before folding along the overdrawn pink lines.

The main reason for the design and use of a brochure is the convenient size to read.

Microsoft Publisher makes it really easy to create a 3 fold brochure - all you have to do is select the type of stationery you want to use and a template is presented to you ready for the design details--no formatting and aligning needed. The following steps detail using Publisher to create a brochure.

Choose a Brochure Design

1. Start Publisher.

2. Click Brochures from the Publication Types - you are given a large variety of starting designs for a three-panel brochure. There are some really great designs to choose from.

3. After you select a design that you like, you can customize your brochure with the various Font and Color Schemes.

4. You can also add Business Information to your brochure.

5. Select or clear Include Customer address, depending on whether you plan to mail your brochure to customers.

6. Under Form, select a type of response to add, or select None.

7. Click the “Create” button to create a starting template.

Replace placeholder Text and Pictures

· The starting template is already set up with boxed sample text in the correctly aligned place on your tri-fold brochure. It includes place markers for name and address and other business details for your company as well as other suggested text. It will include your business details if they are already stored by Microsoft Publisher 2007.

· You can then overtype this text with your own text, move that text, add your own images in place of the predesigned images or anywhere you want.

Complete the Brochure

· At the bottom of this screen there are two small icons showing the number of pages in this design. On this one there are two pages, one for the front and one for the back. You can click on either one of these icons to choose to edit or view the front or back side of your brochure. Both the front and back side of the brochure has pre-formatted suggested text.

· When the brochure looks the way that you want, save the file by clicking Save As on the File menu.

· If you plan to mail your brochure to customers, prepare it for printing by using mail merge to add the addresses onto the copies of the brochure.

· Print your brochures. For more information about two-sided printing, see Print on both sides of a sheet of paper (duplex).

 

Nupur Agarwal
Software Design Engineer in Test, Microsoft Office Publisher

About the blog contributor: Nupur has been working for Microsoft for the past 4 years as a Software Design Engineer in Test. In addition to other areas of expertise, she has experience in Internationalization of Office Products with the emphasis on Complex scripts. She is currently working with the Publisher and Word teams.