Unless you're designing your advertising all by yourself odds are you'll at some point work with a designer. An important detail when it comes to the look of advertisements, and something your designer might not mention, is that colors can look considerably different depending on the type of paper stock you're using.

Let's say you're using brochure printing to send out what's intended to be a simple, black and white brochure. The problem comes when you don't specify what type of paper needs to be used and you accidentally have it printed on a color substrate. Because this type of paper is intended to be used with colors even black ink might show up as something other than black.

When going beyond black and white selecting the right paper stock becomes even more important. For a full color brochure you're going to run into a much wider variety of paper types including the grade, grain and color, all of which can have a huge impact on the way the final product looks.

While understanding more about paper stock is certainly important, I'm not advocating that you make yourself an expert on the topic. There are a lot of variations in types of paper, and more than I would be willing to memorize or research. After all, I have other things to do, and I'm hiring a designer for a reason.

If you're hiring someone to design full color postcards, or flyers, or anything else you might want, just be sure to bring the subject up. A good designer should know far more about something like paper stock than the average business owner. Remember that you can ask them question about the project, and get their input on different details.

Sometimes you might want the red ink to be a certain shade or contain that perfect flare. A good designer can help you decide which type of paper stock will best emphasize the different color schemes. They're the experts on the subject. Call upon that knowledge.

You might not be actually performing all the different jobs yourself when designing advertisements, but if you really care about what the end product is going to be, you should at least have a hand in it. Learn to ask the right questions and find out all the pertinent information and you won't have to worry about getting that full color brochure back only to see the colors are nothing like what you had been expecting them to be.