Modern brochure marketing is no longer simply about pretty pictures. Unlike the sales brochures of old where you rely on the image to sell the product, today you will always have to sell the lifestyle first and complement it with sophisticated photos. This tutorial will teach you how to design a modern shopping brochure in Adobe Photoshop.
1. In this tutorial, we will be designing a trifold brochure. This is the simplest and most standard design for commercially printed brochures. So open up your Adobe Photoshop, create a new document by pressing CTRL+N. Then we use the following settings for the document.
a. Width: 14 inches
b. Height: 8.5 inches
c. Resolution: 300dpi
d. Color Mode: CMYK
2. Afterwards, we will need to build some margin and bleed guidelines, along with the fold guidelines. We will first add the margins. Go to the option View > New Guide. In the dialog window that opens, set the orientation of your guideline (horizontal/vertical) as well as a specific value for the distance from the top or left edge of the document. You will have to do this four times for the primary margins of our brochure.
a. Top Margin: Horizontal – 0.125 inches
b. Bottom Margin: Horizontal – 13.875 inches
c. Left Margin: Vertical – 0.125 inches
d. Right Margin: Vertical – 8.375 inches
3. Next, we add the fold guidelines and their margins. Just Use the same procedure to create these guidelines below. ALL of these are vertical oriented guidelines.
a. L-Fold: 4.525 inches
b. L-Fold-L: 4.65 inches
c. L-Fold-R: 4.775 inches
d. R-Fold: 9.35 inches
e. R-Fold-L: 9.225 inches
f. R-Fold-R: 9.475 inches
4. Along with this we will also add a “bleed” guideline at the edges of our document (which we will add with space later). Create this set of guidelines for the bleed.
a. Bleed Top: Horizontal – 0 inches
b. Bleed Bottom: Horizontal – 8.5 inches
c. Bleed Left: Vertical – 0 inches
d. Bleed Right: Vertical – 14 inches
5. Now, to add the actual bleed space for our document, we go to Image > Canvas size. We will add 0.125 inches of space for EACH SIDE of our document. So we will add 0.25 inches to the width and height of our canvas. (see image). To make sure that the space is divided evenly across the dimensions, make sure that the anchor is set to center.
6. Once you press ok, you will have something like the one in our image here. This is a nice base template for a typical trifold brochure that is Print ready. Save this now as your main trifold template. Take note that depending on which side of the brochure you are working on, the designations for the panels should be different. For the front, the cover is on the right, the back cover at the center, and the inner flap is at the left. For the back design or inner side, we just have the left, center and right panels of course.
We will now work on our front design first. So this means the front, back covers as well as the flap. We will be creating a shopping brochure that sells clothes. So our first move is to paste in some images of models in fancy clothes images. There are three panels and all, and we paste in 3 as well. We use a larger one for the cover. Make sure that you scale them down correctly by pressing CTRL+T and then holding the shift key as you resize them. We got some creative images from deviant art from these pages
a. Model 1
b. Model 2
c. Model 3
8. Now, using the rectangle tool we place several rectangles along with our images. This gives us text areas for our brochure design.
9. Next, we process the images. We select each one, and press CTRL+SHIFT+U. This will de-saturate our images, making them loose color.
10. We will now add Theme colors to them. First create a new layer by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+N. Name this layer color accent. Place it just under our rectangle layers, but right above the images.
11. Next, we use the gradient color tool on this new layer. Change your foreground and background colors to two brighter theme colors. Then just drag the gradient color tool across the new layer to “color” our images. Do not worry about the color flooding the images.
12. Then, we change the blend mode of the color layer to “hard light” and reduce its opacity to around 38 percent.
13. Great! Now for the flap panel, we will add some effects to its image. Select its image and press CTRL+J to quickly duplicate it. Then, we moved it a little bit to the right. We then just reduce its opacity to 20%.
14. Just repeat the process for the other images as you please. Note that we did not to this for the cover.
15. We then just add the text using the text type tool. Here we have varied the colors a bit of course to make things more creative and emphasized. Also take note that we have varied the font size and the font upper or lower casing for a great effect.
16. Then using the same technique as before we duplicate our text headlines, move them and reduce their opacity.
17. GREAT! Now we have our front design. Save this layout as your front design.
18. We then create the back or inner design. We use the same tricks from earlier. For the inner design however our rectangles are more prominent for the content.
19. We also put all the images on top using the same tricks as before. Here we are using images from these sources:
a. Model 4
b. Model 5
c. Model 6
20. Congratulations! That finishes our back design as well.
We now have a nice modern shopping brochure design. Apply what you learned for your own brochures.
Good Luck!
Author Bio
Kate Manhaven is currently working as a graphic artist in one of the leading online providers of offset printing and mailing services, PrintPlace.com. She is adept in designing print ready poster designs and printable and customized brochures, business cards, and creative postcard art works using Photoshop and Illustrator. She also loves to write graphic design tutorials during her free time.
