The best part of designing pamphlets and brochures is that you can create custom brochures from scratch. It’s not rocket science and gets done pretty easily. You simply need to do is grab some quality high-resolution attention-grabbing images and set a pleasant color palette. Seems pretty interesting, right? So, let’s see how to make or design a cool brochure on Google Docs.
How to Design a Brochure on Google Docs
A standard tri-fold brochure is a single paper folded into thirds. It generally has three parts — the first flap, core content, and the back cover. Needless to say, the first flap generally has an attractive attention-grabbing image with a small gist of the content. The second column or the second flap has all the details, while the back cover has the details like contact, address, and the likes. While designing a brochure, there are a few things that you need to keep in mind. The first is the color palette and the second is the design theme. Both these need to remain consistent in all three flaps. Now, that we have everything set, let’s get down to business, shall we? Step 1: A standard brochure generally measures around 8.5 x 11-inches and yields a decent tri-fold brochure. To set up the dimensions, open a document on Google Doc and click on File > Page Setup. Now, change the orientation to Landscape. At the same time, click on Page Color to choose the background color of your brochure. This ensures that the brochure is printed in the same color right up to the edge. It’s optional though. Now, set the Margins of the pages to around 0.25. This lets you create the design right up to the edges. Step 2: Now, comes the interesting part. Since Google Docs doesn’t have the provision to create individual boxes, we’ll take the help of tables. We will be creating a standard 3 x 2 table. To do so, click on Insert > Table and select 3 columns and 2 rows. Once done, drag the table border to the bottom edge. The idea is to color the bottom row in a different shade for an interesting look. Step 3: To add color, right-click on the table cell and select Table Properties > Cell background color. Repeat the above steps for the remaining two cells. Step 4: Now that the color of the brochure has been taken care of, let’s fill the columns with images and text. Click on Insert > Image, to add an image directly. At this point, just make sure that it’s a high-resolution image to ensure minimum pixelation. Note: All the images need to have the same size. Else, the table might spill over to the next page, and that is something we don’t want. Interestingly, you can also crop the images into shapes. To do that, select a column, and go to Insert > Drawing. Next, click on the Image icon to upload an image from your PC. Once that’s uploaded, click on the Crop icon and select a shape of your liking. Needless to say, you will have to scale the borders of the image. Google Docs doesn’t allow you to move the image around freely. However, you can still play with the vertical alignment within the cell. Just place the cursor above the image and hit Enter. Step 5: Now that the brochure color and the images have been handled, it’s time to insert some text. Again, there are two ways of doing it. You can either place the text directly inside the second row and align the text as per your preference. Or, you can also explore a fancier way by including the text inside a shape. To do so, head over to Drawing > Shapes. Now, all you need to do is add the text inside the shape, and add it to the location of your choice. In our case, we had disabled the background color and our finished brochure looked something like this. Cool, right? Once the rough draft of the brochure is ready, print a copy to see if it gives the right vibes before proceeding to print the whole batch.
Let Your Creativity Run Wild
It goes without saying that Google Docs is not the best place to design a brochure, especially if you are looking for some flexibility. But if you can’t access tools like Canva, Crello (see Canva vs Crello), or Adobe Spark due to some reason, this humble word processor proves to be an able backup plan.
