Designing Your Own Brochure Or Letterhead?

When creating your brochure, business card, or maybe letterhead, you may want to use a company logo or other image in your design. The first thing to figure out is how many colors do you want your project to print in and go from there. That will help determine the graphics you want to use or colors of the graphics for that project.

The next step in to analyze the image(s) that you want to place in your design to determine if they are pixel based or line based. What I mean by this is what type of file is it? Is it a line based image or vector file (i.e. Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw .EPS)? Or is it a file that is built on pixels (i.e. JPEG, TIFF, GIF, or BMP)? This is important to know because it will determine how the commercial printer chooses to print your file which will ultimately affect price.

If your graphic is a pixel based graphic such as a photo or a logo saved as a TIFF or JPEG, the only way you can print this is using four color process or CMYK printing. This type of file cannot be color separated into spot colors. If you are doing a full color brochure, then this is not a problem because you are going to design the rest of the brochure in CMYK anyway. But if you are printing letterhead or envelopes, this can greatly affect the cost of printing by making it more expensive than spot color printing. You could opt to print the logo in just one color or two colors by transforming the image into a monotone or duotone in Photoshop, but then you may not get what you are looking for. I will talk more about monotones and duotone in future articles.

If your graphic is a vector file or lined based, they it can be easily color separated into whatever colors you would like to use in your design.

These are some basics as I could go into much further and in depth explanations of vector and pixel files. I plan to do that so stay posted.