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Have you checked your mailbox recently and been inundated with various brochures? It may be the local pizza store or a tree lopper who has kindly sent you a magnet to stick on your fridge.

We have kept a little collection recently of these types of materials and we are going to go through the effectiveness of the graphic design of one of them.

Take this DL sized direct mail out which dropped into the letterbox one day. This was a sad one for the owner of this business who has invested some money into creating a DL brochure with a magnet attached.

After taking one glance at this there were many design issues which could be a learning lesson for anyone attempting to improve on something like this.

One:  This DL brochure is PACKED to overflowing with information. There is a common perception that you must put as much information into your marketing piece as possible. This is not true.  You must ask yourself: "is it going to get read"? The terrible truth about this brochure is that people probably won't read any of the detail. It was not enticing visually and even if you were looking for a plumber you probably would go somewhere else after being overwhelmed with all the information.

Two: It has no space in the design. A design needs air. In this case a bit of white space would do wonders.

Three: It needs to have a hierarchy of information that the eye can easily follow. This means: clear titles, clear subtitles and well identified topic areas.

Four: Too many colours! This one has black, red, yellow, light blue and purple. Choose a harmonious colour scheme and use that wisely throughout your piece. Do not highlight text with yellow highlight as it only serves to make the piece busy. Once again the hierarchy of information is important so you do not have to use devices such as yellow highlight.

Five: Use a clean, easy to read font. This font appears to be  Times New Roman or a close cousin. As there are so many varying font sizes in this piece it makes it look overly busy and hard to read.

Six: Remember line spacing is your friend. Line spacing should be at least 3 points...at least!

In conclusion: Someone paid a decent amount of money for this brochure hoping that it would get noticed, get their key message across and ultimately increase their business.  Unfortunately this brochure is so overwhelming it probably was immediately filed in the bin!

A clear effective design of quality with a few key messages is far more beneficial than a bargain basement deal for the cheapest design and printing.