Making a good brochure is not easy, even if you are an experience graphic designer. There are certain very important things you should know before you start designing a brochure.

First thing is to know the purpose or the motive of the brochure. There must be some purpose and your first job is to find out what is in your client's mind. What your client wants to achieve through this brochure. Once you and your client is very clear about the purpose of brochure, next step is to design the brochure in such a way that it will fulfill this purpose. You have to select any of the following types.

1. Advertising type of brochure: the function of this type of brochure is to market the client’s product. This type of brochure can be divided in to two distinct parts. One is catchy or attention getting headline and other part consists of features and benefits of client's products.

2. Informative type of brochure: The main purpose of this type of brochure is providing information and there by educating the targeted readers. This type of brochure has a good cover page highlighting client's products and all the relevant information regarding those products are written inside.

3. Entertaining type of brochure: This type of brochure is mainly used by the entertaining and other such industry and their main purpose is to entertain the reader. These types of brochure are not used very often. Now a day it is used to entertain the kids by displaying puzzles, quizzes, drawing etc.

After deciding on the types of brochure to use, next thing is to decide how much panels it should contains. To get accurate idea of number of panels to include you should consider following

1. How much content you have to include?

2. Use of your brochure

3. Bleed is preferable or not?

4. It has some unique folders or it uses standard fold?

5. If this brochure is to be posted by the direct mail then what are the regulation and restrictions of postal department about the size of brochure?

6. Is the brochure is in the form of BRC (Business Reply Card)?

7. Budget?

You must get all above points to be answered by your client before designing the brochure, not only that but you should also consult the printer regarding the particular requirements of your client. Since tailor made brochure costs higher than the standard sized brochure.

After clarifying and understanding these you should really start designing the brochure. While designing it is good practice to consider the focal point, alignments, contrast, hues and such factors. Overall design should look pleasing to eyes.

There are certain things you should avoid while making brochure, like don't use Arial or Helvetica type faces since they are over used, it is better not to use over 12 point type faces, Use more than 2 or maximum 3 different types of fonts. Avoid using different types of fonts in a single page. Once you have selected the alignment stick to it. Don't change the alignment halfway.

If you consider all these things then you will have a good brochure which not only your client but their customers also like.