Creating a brochure is simple, as long as you've got the time and a little pocket change. Creating a brochure that generates new sales, on the other hand, takes a little more thought. It doesn't have to be hard, though. The following tips should provide the important elements of creating a professional brochure.

Observe: Collect and study brochures from around the community, especially from competitors and businesses in related fields. Try asking yourself what makes one design more appealing than another? This can help you develop your own sense of good design and can help generate fresh ideas for your own brochure printing.

Find Your Voice: Ask yourself who you are trying to reach with your marketing message, and how you want to come across to them? Once you have an idea about who you are trying to speak to, try choosing a font that will emphasis the tone you have decided on (professional, humorous, casual). Try to avoid using more than two or three different fonts so you don't end up distracting the reader from your message. Avoid excessive underlining, which can cause clutter and make text harder to read. Instead of going crazy with the underlining use larger font size to highlight the text you wish to stand out to your reader.

Less is More: Try to refine the purpose of your brochure and decide what information is necessary to convey your advertising message. Once you've got your concept distilled, try to arrange the elements of your brochure in order of importance. The clearer you are about the order of importance of your information, the better your final brochure will be. Make sketches or cutouts and move the various elements around, if need be, to get an idea of how the elements of your brochure fit together and flow. This way you can try repositioning the various elements to see how your design is affected.

Blank Space is OK: Don't feel you have to fill the whole page. Effective use of empty spaces can make your brochure look more professional. Instead of using bars or boxes to separate components of your brochure try using empty space instead to create a relationship between the contents and the page. Blank space can even be used to bring specific information into focus or to make an element stand out. Just keep in mind that the amount of negative space in a design affects its overall feeling of lightness or heaviness to a reader. As always, remember the image you are trying to project.

Proofread: No matter how good your brochure looks, a simple spelling mistake can give readers an unprofessional impression. Obviously, you should proofread your final design several times before having it printed to avoid this very problem. Once your brochure is printed, it's too late to fix an error that you didn't spot. If possible, get a second person to proofread your text as well for an extra safety net.