Importance of well-designed company profile brochures

What is the company profile?

A company profile is like a resume for the business. It charts the company’s origin and it’s past works and clients. It serves as an official pitch to the potential client or investor. The profile presents the company’s history in a positive light and acts as a trust-building initiative. It thus can redress a company’s past failings by highlighting the lessons they have learned and how they are now better for it. The profile gives a peek into the company’s inner workings and it’s workers and can convince a reader of its reliability and empathy. It also features positive reviews and experiences of past clients and collaborators. Hence, the profile is a vital part of formal public relations.

Why does your company need profile brochures?

The company profile is an important formal aspect of marketing. It is a document that will be sought by any individual taking a serious interest in your business. Thus, this audience should be given the most attention since they are the few who already have a positive opinion and are looking to benefit your company.

The brochure is a booklet or pamphlet which contains the details or summarization of the company profile. It can be realized in several formats both analogue and digital. It presents not only the business but also its brand identity. The brochure is also a good medium to provide a bunch of details in a small digest. The details can also be categorized and laid out with relevant graphics to make them easy to grasp. Thus, the profile brochure is not only essential but with the right design, it can act as an attractive artefact embodying the company’s brand identity.

Design of good brochures

A good profile brochure has to balance many aspects of information and presentation. A company profile may need to describe several facets of the company and can be information-heavy. But you also need to convey the information with clarity and simultaneously attract the viewer to your brand. Thus the tradeoffs between informing and attracting must be deliberate design decisions.

Cover design

The brochure cover is the first arena where good design thinking and sensibilities can make a huge impact. It creates the first impressions about the company brand and also serves as a display for the company logo. Since the company profile is a formal document, the cover should reflect professionalism with a sober aesthetic. But that does not mean the cover should be boring. If anything it makes it more worthy to create an attractive cover with visual interest. This positively subverts the viewer’s expectations. But an overtly catchy cover might attract irrelevant viewers and can also feel too informal for official communication. A well-balanced cover will make an individual with relevant interests pick it up and browse through.

For hard copies of the brochure, the first impressions of quality and consistency are also conveyed subconsciously through the look and feel of the brochure’s cover and page surface. Texture can be incorporated by changing the material of the surfaces selectively and corresponding to the underlying design and layout. For example, a highlighted box can be made to feel glossy in a matte page surface. This provides both visual and tactile interest in presenting the brochure.

The brochure should also be designed considering the audience it is for. Both digital and analogue brochures can be generated in multiple formats. It can range from the size of a single leaflet to a folded pamphlet to a multi-page booklet. This depends on the target audience of your brochure and the depth of detail they are looking for when they get the brochure.

Immersive guidance

Information dispensation through a brochure should be approached similarly to an infographic. It’s the brochure’s role to present the company’s various facets with clarity. The design of the brochure thus has to have a prescribed UX. It is presenting the company history through a logically connected narrative to invoke a positive opinion from the reader.

The layout and content design should guide the user meaningfully. Practically, this means presenting the informative details in interesting layers, with the most important ones having the most conspicuous highlights. Further, the layout can use interesting visual shapes and text bodies to break up monotonic information and bring clarity through meaningful separations.

The layout of visual elements also dictates the use of negative space. Negative space is the unused space separating graphics, text bodies, and decorations. It can be used deliberately to intuitively imply the separation of topics. It also helps focus the actual visual elements and allows them to draw the reader's eye and guide him subliminally through the content. If you are using a thematically homogeneous template, don’t be afraid to modify the template according to the UX requirements of each topic, to attain clarity.

Narrative theme

The UX narrative should be interwoven with the brand’s personality and should be reflected in the theme and aesthetics. This can be done by consistently using a chosen scheme for the shapes and colours used. The brand identity comes out through the theme if the shape choices adhere to the brand’s style and the colours are emblematic of the brand. For example, a technical or corporate brand should use geometric shapes to display rigour and stability, where a tourism or lifestyle brand might use organic shapes to convey a carefree or warm mood. The company’s brand colours complemented with the right background are also effective in acquainting the reader of the company’s vision and personality.

Thus, carefully designing your company’s profile brochure is essential to give your business the edge over your competitors, informal interactions with clients and shareholders. It has the potential to step beyond the requirements of professional etiquettes and make a significant impact on the company in the reader's mind.