In a society that worships consumerism as its king we are constantly bombarded by information. So immersed are we in this information swamp, that we stop seeing it around us, not even noticing the thousands of images that we see on a daily basis. Television, the internet, magazines, newspapers, signage, packaging and billboards all compete for our attention and if they don't get it instantly we just move on to the next one.

As someone trying to let people know about your services or products, how do you stand out from the crowd? With so much to choose from, how do you get anyone to stop and look at your ad, read your brochure, click through your website? The answer is to get some good advice from a designer. They have a professional contribution to make to your business with valuable advice that will ultimately save you time and money. So how does good design really help you? After all, you can always whip something up on the computer yourself (or get your next door neighbour's cousin to do it). Why pay a designer? Because good design is about visual communication. And as with any form of communication, you need to know the language.

A good designer understands how to communicate your message to the people you want to hear. They do it by understanding how people interpret the thousands of images they see each day. How they use associations to file the information in their brains, including how they relate to colour, how they read and what they assume when they look at a graphic or font style.

Many small businesses struggle to find a balance between producing professional-looking documentation and keeping the budget on track. Graphic designers often charge large fees to produce something that you could probably have done a lot of yourself, at no cost except your time. Printers dictate a minimum amount of copies, when you may only need a few, at a cost that is beyond the project budget. Many businesses decide that the costs involved are prohibitive and produce the documentation themselves.

The result is often a document that is produced in-house that looks like it's been created in Word or Paintbox and does little or nothing to distinguish you from your competitors. There are, however, ways you can produce professional-looking documentation (such as letterhead, business cards, brochures and reports) in-house and at a minimum cost - you just need to think a bit differently. This article will give you some ideas on how you can improve your marketing ideas without breaking the budget.

Don‘t try to cram everything in that you possibly can — too much copy just puts readers off, you need to give the reader a reason to make contact. A good idea we suggest when writing copy for an A4 brochure is that for half a page of type in 10pt or 12 pt roughly equals a standard A4 double-sided brochure. Remember less is more.

Reinforce existing branding from other brochures, packaging, website or identity. The more you use it, the more memorable it becomes in people’s minds and the more they associate it with your product. If you swap and change your look from this to that it only confuses people. If you have a range of brochures, try to make them look like they belong together but are still different, a "family" of brochures, ie keep a feature that is similar throughout all the brochures.

Make sure the font is legible and appropriate, they most off putting thing is any design is fonts that you cant read. Try to keep font sizes at a minimum of 9 pt, if you are expecting your audience to be in an older age bracket it is better to make the font size a little biggers 12 pt. Other things you can do to make the text easier to read put extra spacing between the lines (this is called leading) and remember to add spaces between paragraphs or indent the first line, rather than having all the paragraphs bunched up together.

Avoid script type fonts for large areas of copy try to use a serif fonts such as Times New Roman (these are fonts with small "tails" on the ends of the letters) work best as they help to lead the eye along the copy. For small areas of text possible font choices could be swiss, arial, or futura.

Make sure the design is focused on your target market, try to feature the things will interest them. For example if you are targeting a younger audience, try to make the look of your brochure look fun and bright. Avoid too much technical jargon where possible this will only confuse people and put them off – more in-depth information can always be included on your website, brochures are valuable focal point that should outline the main features and lead the reader to call or visit your site. Give the reader a reason to make contact.

This one question we get a lot, can I use images from my website. The short answer is not really. Imagery taken from the web has been optimised for screen viewing and quick load time. The quality of web images is lowered dramatically. When these images are printed they often come out pixellated (blurry and grainy) and can reflect poorly on your image and product.

Remember large digital images can be resized, and still get a large enough image, however cameras that take small photos often can’t be resized, so when taking your own digital images set your camera to the largest possible setting to ensure a large photo is taken.

To get a professional look it’s worth investing in a professional photographer to create a series of images that can be reused as part of your branding in all your marketing material. Alternatively buy a series of royalty-free stock images on CD that are appropriate to your industry. Industry bodies themselves often sell this sort of thing so check with them as a first port of call.

It’s very easy when you are looking at a piece over and over to read what you think is there rather than what is really on the page. Always use a spell-checking tool and get someone that has not been involved to read it as well. 95% of the time you will have missed something that another person will pick up. If not, read the copy out loud, very slowly, two or three times, pointing at each word as you go.

Remember - it's when you start effectively organising, packaging and presenting your content that you can take your marketing and business to whole new levels, dramatically increasing both your attention value and your net income.

Full Colour
All colours the human eye can see are derived from red, blue and green. On-screen colours are created by combining these colours with varying intensity. White occurs when the intensity of each of these colours is equal. Black is an absence of these colours. This is called "additive colour". As the eye only sees in red green and blue, the problem in printing is reflecting these colours. To do this "subtractive colour" is used. Cyan absorbs red light, magenta absorbs green light and yellow absorbs blue light. White is the absence of colour and black is an equal mix of all three colours (though this is not a true black and printers use an additional black ink to add definition). Monitors use an RGB colour space (additive colour) to produce an approximation of full colour at a resolution of 72 dpi. Printers use CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and blacK) inks (subtractive colour) at a resolution of 300 dpi to approximate full colour.

Spot colour
Spot colour is where one or more colours are specified for printing and can include metallic inks and varnishes. Spot colours can be screened and mixed to give the effect of additional colours and where less than four colours are used is cheaper than full colour printing. Colour matching is achieved by specifying ink from a Pantone Colour Matching System. Colours are specified as PMS numbers and systems such as these ensure you will get an accurate reproduction of the colour that you want.

Monotones and Duotones
Most people think of black and white when they think of monotone colour, but any colour can be used instead of black. Consider sepia toned images in a dark brown or a dark blue to add extra dimension to the page without increasing costs. Or perhaps a duotone (an image with two colour channels) to add depth to the image.

With so many companies choosing to produce their marketing and promotional material in-house, it is important to have a full understanding of the information you are working with. This article gives a brief overview of digital images and colour reproduction and their use in print and screen output.
Digital images are composed of one of two file types, reflecting two different technologies - vector files and bitmap files.

Vector files, also known as "object-oriented" files, Vector files also plot simple shapes such as squares and circles.You can scale a vector graphic up or down and the program recalculates the points and draws a line in between at the highest screen or print resolution. For this reason, vector files are considered to be "resolution independent".
The fonts used by computers are also vector files, as you can see when you break the letters apart in a drawing program. Vector files have much smaller file sizes than bitmap images as there is less information required to be stored in the file (vector files plot specific points, bitmaps plot every point).

Bitmap files, are used for images that require a full tonal range, such as photographs. There are four characteristics to bitmap files - resolution, dimensions, bit depth and colour model.