I know that as a small business owner you wear many hats – manager, service provider, accounts payable, accounts receivable, secretary, receptionist, sales rep, toilet cleaner, and – oh yeah – marketing manager. You may pride yourself as the Jack (or Jill) of all trades, but is that well-rounded renaissance git-r-done style reflected in your marketing pieces?

In other words, did you just slap your brochure together in Microsoft Publisher (sans spell check) so you would have more time pick up a ream of paper and grab a chicken sandwich before meeting with a client and hitting the UPS store? As sinful as it is, a crappy marketing piece is forgivable, taking your hectic circumstances into consideration.

Now at this point, you may be thinking (very defensively, I might add), “There’s nothing wrong with my brochure. Bill’s Tax Service doesn’t even have a brochure.” Touché. Not.

‘Tis better to have nothing than to have a super-choppy, unsightly photo-filled, spelling atrocity representing you and your company. But fear not. Useful design tips are forthcoming.

If I achieve what I am trying to accomplish, you will look back at that brochure (letterhead, website, business card, ________ fill in the blank) and say “Ahhhhh,” followed by, “Yikes!” You may even giggle (depending on how bad it was to start with).

So, without further ado, let us proceed with the first part of the “Design Tips for Amateurs” series: Type

Type (a.k.a. Text)

This is a biggie, assuming that you want your potential clientele to actually read your brochure rather than using it as a make-shift sticky note. First, let’s speak to form.

There are three different kinds of type – serif, sans serif, and novelty. Briefly, serif fonts have little “feet”, sans serif are, well, sans “feet”, and novelty fonts are the scripty, wacky, edgy fonts that we love to use (and often overuse).

So now that you know what the different types of fonts are, here’s the lowdown on how to use.

Serif fonts are reportedly the easiest font to read. That’s why the default font on your Microsoft applications are usually some variation of Times. But you don’t have to stick with ho-hum Times. You can class it up a little with Garamond or Georgia or something a little less common. One caveat – avoid Courier, unless you’re trying to make your piece look like a government classified document. It’s the old typewriter font.

Sans-serif fonts are modern looking. Think clean. Most professionally designed websites use sans-serif fonts like Verdana or Arial. I myself am a fan of the sans-serif, not just for web, but almost anything. It’s what all the cool kids use.

Finally novelty fonts. Ahh…novelty fonts. Aren’t they fun? Fun to use, but not, I repeat NOT, fun to read. A little novelty goes a long way. Rule #1: Never use novelty fonts in your body text. It’s that simple. Don’t do it. You wanted your business card to look elegant, so you put your name, address, email, and phone number in a script font. You proudly presented your masterpiece to a potential client, but never heard back. It wasn’t because he or she didn’t want to do business with you. It’s because they couldn’t read your phone number! While it is permissible to use a novelty font in a headline (18 pt. or above), I plead with you to use restraint with both font choice and placement. Be honest with yourself about whether you can really read it. Or just ask someone else. Oh yeah – You only get one novelty font per document. Don’t cheat.

So now that you know the different types of fonts, let’s talk about the size of your type. Unless your marketing piece is also a low-vision aid, you’re going to want to keep the body of your text relatively small, likely between 10 pt. and 14 pt. A 12 pt. font size is pretty typical for body copy. If you suspect that your audience will be of more of a gray-haired persuasion, you might want to bump it up to 14 pt. On a business card, you may have to go with as small as possible without losing readability – 8 pt. or 9 pt.

Headlines should be significantly bigger (and bolder) than the body of your text. If you are planning on having sub-heads, create enough size differential between the headline and the body text for the sub-head to size nicely in between. Headlines should probably start around 16 pt.

Okay, we’ve covered type, size, now on to….alignment (if you’re about to fall asleep at this point, go grab a fully-caffienated Diet Coke. Everything I’m talking about contributes to the overall look of your piece.)

So there are four basic ways to align your text – flush left, flush right, centered and justified. When text is flush left, it all lines up on the left hand side with the lines hanging on the end, so as not to cut off any words. Flush right is the opposite. Centered is, well pretty self explanatory, and justified is the “blocking” off of text so that it lines up on both sides.

I prefer justified text. It looks cleaner, although you do have to pay attention to the hyphenating of words. If there are more than one or two lines ending with hyphenated words, your text begins to look ugly. You can correct this by putting your cursor in front of the offending word and spacing over to drop the whole word on to the next line. If you don’t feel up to this, you should probably choose to have your text flushed left. This is perfectly natural and easy to read.

Okay, we’ve covered three biggies, and now we’re on the home stretch. I’m going to summarize the final rules of type in the form of No-No’s.

1. Using all caps SUCH AS THIS is a definite No-No. You can get away with it in a headline, but in a body text, it is downright resentful to read. So turn the Caps Lock off. Like now.

2. Using red text (or blue or green or other dark color) on a dark background is a No-No. Similarly, light text (example yellow on white) is also a No-No. The reason – text needs to contrast with the background. Anything else is unreadable.

3. Stacking your text like

T

H

I

S

is a No-No. If you feel like your text must be vertical, then flip the whole word around. Occasionally one can pull off a stacked text look. But that is for professionals. Don’t try it at home.

4. Finally, overusing your Bold, Italic, and Underline features is a No-No. These should be used very sparingly only to emphasize a point. Bold can be used for heads and sub-heads but keep it out of the body copy unless you want one word or phrase to stand out. I would suggest not using Underline at all. Italicize instead of underline.

So the good news is now you know why people are cringing when you open up your brochure, and you can vow not to repeat these mistakes. The bad news is you need to figure out what to do with 1,500 ugly brochures.

For those that are brave and without pride, send me your marketing piece by email, and I will choose examples to post, critique, and correct. Next article in this series – Photos.