Brochure Design for the Arts

            Designing brochures for marketing culture and the arts can be somewhat trickier then many people would presume. Larger theatres may of course be able to hire someone to design the brochure for them. However most theatres do not have marketing budgets which would allow them to do this. You as part of the theater may then be required to help with this. Something which may fall a little outside your artistic domain.

            There are three things to keep in mind when you begin designing a brochure. First you must think about the message you wish to communicate, about the theatre, the performance, and your community. All three of these things are important, and the first and last of these should remain fairly consistent through different performances. Think about your community, what do people in it think makes it special? Whatever these things are, and whatever your theater and the performance can bring to this is what you need your brochure to say.

            Second you need your brochure’s look and feel to be different from the look and feel of other brochures in your community, unless you have a specific reason for a similarity, to help make a connection with something in the community. It is important then to look around at the colors of other people’s brochures in the community. This should also help give you layout ideas, for your brochure.

            Finally keep in mind that a brochure itself has multiple panels and so it must be designed both open and one panel at a time. This is one of the challenges of brochure design, as is the fact that brochures are now so common they are normally regulated to the trash fairly quickly or simply ignored.

            A few design tactics to keep in mind is that people will tend to like items which are laid out to a little more then 5/8^th’s of a page. Without going into a long complex explanation, and there are books regarding this subject this ratio is a close approximation of the golden ratio, on which you can easily find more information online.

            One should also keep in mind that warm colors tend to attract attention, red being one of the most attractive, and orange being the first noticed color by most men, and magenta being first noticed among women. However you should take care with these colors as orange means caution in our society something you may not want associated with your theater, and magenta is a color many guys steer clear of. Of course if you are targeting women with your brochure this may be a positive as it will help keep people who would be less interested from picking up and then tossing the brochure. Keep in mind also that you want your brochure to stand out against what is already in the community where you are handing it out, so you should avoid making the color of a common brochure your primary color.

            If you have lots of trouble getting a brochure made, you can also try hiring a designer on commission, through the internet, etc. This could be done in such a way that you agree to pay them so much money to start, and then an additional amount per ticket survey in which the customer says they saw and where influenced by the brochure. Falling into the pay after routine does give you the advantage of not having to pay for everything at once, however it could end up costing more, so this should only be used in some rare circumstances. Before doing this always try to design something yourself and then ask different people about it, better yet design 5 or 6 brochures so that those discussing them have things to say they like and don’t like.