Our basic advice is to ‘print-less’ and ‘post-more’ as in post your ‘Full Brochure’ online as an electronic pdf on your website. PDF stands for Portable Document Format.
What we are suggesting is that your online ‘Brochures’ be compatible with home and business desktop printers. Your online brochures can be created in a variety of software but the final file should be saved in the pdf format which is compatible with virtually all computers operating systems. With this approach your online brochure is available 24/7 from your website.
More Details …
What should you really ‘Print’? For actual ‘Printed’ literature we suggest bookmarks and rack cards to hand-out. The reason for this is that the traditional tri-fold brochure (which refers to an 8.5 x 11 piece of paper folded in thirds) is more expensive to ‘Print’ than ‘Flat’ Rack Cards and Bookmarks (because Rack Cards and Bookmarks do not have folds).
And have you ever seen a “tri-fold brochure” posted on a website?
Another problem with the typical tri-fold brochure is that when formatted with folds a tri-fold brochure is NOT set up to print from a website like an 8.5 x 11 brochure so a company still needs to make an 8.5 x 11 ‘flyer-formatted’ brochure that can be posted online and accessed from the company website.
More about Rack Cards …
Rack Cards are simply large bookmarks. A Rack Card is generally 4” wide x 9” tall and has no folds. The Rack Card can be laid out with a vertical or horizontal format. The point of the Rack Card is that it is an overview of your services with your domain name featured prominently. You then hand out the Rack Card to drive people to your website where they can download your online 8.5 x 11 ‘flyer-formatted for the Internet and desktop computers.
When Hiring a Graphic Designer for your 4-Color Printing Projects …
When hiring a graphic designer to prepare 4-color digital artwork be sure to negotiate ahead of time that your project cost includes a copy of the ‘native-files’ of the project. This means that once the project is finished the graphic designer has agreed to give you all necessary files needed in printing the item. Once you receive these files keep them in safe place. If you ever need to reprint the project and the graphic designer has moved away, you will have files* that another graphic designer can use, of course you would have to find a graphic designer that uses the same graphics software the files were created in.
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