To elaborate, when it comes to a small advertisement like a postcard, if you have a very simple, basic template that you keep reusing, people are going to be more likely to notice. There are naturally fewer elements in a postcard and so when those elements are used again and again, people will begin to see, and the postcard will be less effective.

With a brochure you have a lot of different things that you are working with. Brochures are naturally multiple pages when folded in a certain way, and so even if you use the same brochure template for a large number of them, people will not be as likely to notice.

So what does go into a good brochure template?

The front of your brochure needs to accomplish two different things. The first is it needs to grab a person's attention and the second thing it needs to do is let them know what they are going to be reading about. The title itself can act as the attention grabber, but often you will see the front of full color brochures have some brilliant image on them as well.

The inside of the brochure is going to cover a certain amount of points. Maybe these will be a list of different services you have, or maybe they will specifically expand upon the title of your brochure. Each brochure might be different in this regard.

The way they will cover each point will be through a title letting people know what that section is about, and a paragraph or longer description. These will often have an image associated with them as well, but once again, this is not always going to be a given.

Finally the brochure will end by bringing everything together, and giving out your contact information.

With this basic format you can create a wide range of brochures. You can even shift between text heavy and image heavy brochures with the same template.

Let us say for each point you have your box for the headline, your box for the text, and another box for an image. If you do not have an image than instead pull out an important quote from the text, enlarge it, and put it inside the box for the picture. Now you can emphasize the text and help people more casually flip through your brochure and still get all the important information.

If you plan on creating a lot of color brochures I would suggest you set up a template for them. That way you can save yourself a lot of time and money for each of them. Maybe alter your template every year or few years. Once you have a solid template, I think you will be surprised at how long you can create powerful brochures from it.