Printing brochures is a critical part of many organizations' communication activities. Brochures are necessary for both internal and external communications, including introductory manuals, advertisements, and explainers. When the time comes to produce a brochure, you'll want to know you'll be putting out the best possible product. Fortunately, an organization can do these three things to maximize the quality of its brochures.

Work with Professional Printers

Unless you have a large operation with extensive brochure printing capabilities, it's best to have a professional third party produce your work. They will have capabilities that are hard to reproduce even with business-grade printing systems.

For example, they can produce high-gloss, full-color, and full-bleed products. If you've ever seen a brochure with slick photography that goes to the edge of the page, that's the kind of item you can expect from a team of experienced printers. Even if your company has significant in-house design capacity, it's best to leverage the machinery and talent available at a printing company if you want the best results.

Use Quality Imagery

It is hard for a brochure to exceed its inputs. Consequently, you'll want to prepare high-quality imagery for your brochures. If you're using photos, make sure everything is shot to a high professional standard. That is especially true if the imagery represents your team members or your company's products and services. Similarly, make sure all graphs, data tables, and charts in the brochure look clean and professional.

Also, it's a good idea to have high-quality versions of your digital work files available for the brochure printing business to use. High-resolution photographs are critical, as are scalable vector graphics for logos, charts, and other design elements.

Employ Separations and Color Profiles

Separations are the colors used to produce an item. If you're using a four-color process, for example, the separations would likely be cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. Using separations will make it easier to ensure that the printer's results are as close to your expectations as possible.

Color profiles serve a similar purpose but for the digital components of the process. A properly calibrated set of color profiles will ensure that the images on your screen represent close matches to those on the printing company's screens and the printing machine's output.

Ask the brochure printing business to send you copies of their profiles for their printers and monitors so you can try to closely match things up. This should reduce the number of adjustments necessary during the proofing process.

Contact a company like Printing Industry Exchange, LLC for more information.