The advice on design I'm about to give applies to any kind of advertisements, no matter what style it is. It doesn't matter if you prefer brochures, the simple business card, or a large poster as the centerpiece of your commercial printing, there are still common design elements that all of these greatly varying forms of advertising share.

A very important design element you need to understand is the limits you need to place on the different styles of design you use in a single advertisement. I suggest this because I've seen plenty of ads from all sorts of different companies and industries that have the same problem, and suffer because of it.

On a general note, never place too many different elements in your advertisements. What exactly does this mean? I'll elaborate.

Take the font. You should never use more than three different font types, and could probably work best with only two fonts. Having your company name on a business card in a different font from the general information about you can be a great way to bring out your company name and draw more attention to it.

Similarly, having the title of a poster in a different style than the general text helps to draw the eye more to the title. In a longer form of advertising such as a brochure you might want to pull out specific quotes that detail what the general emphasis of the brochure is meant to be, and have those quotes in a different font type.

But with all of these, they only work if you limit yourself to two or three fonts at most. After all, if every page of the brochure is in a different font, suddenly none of it becomes emphasized. It just looks like a mess of varying fonts without a focus.

The same is true for colors. You want to have a certain amount of defining colors that act as the overall theme of the advertisement, but you don't want to load up your brochure with every color possible. You can use the color green to draw attention to a section on environmentally friendly products, or a bright, eye catching color to a sales announcement. But if every color is bright and urgent, then none of them are anymore, because it all just blends together.

Layout is no different. Pick a single layout and stick to it all throughout. You might vary up a layout briefly to make a specific point have a bigger impact, but if you vary up everything people won't be able to figure out what they're supposed to look at next.

There are a lot of different kinds of commercial printing out there that work wonders for your marketing, but don't think that just because two forms are different that they don't share common traits. Once you know what works well for all advertisements, you'll be better prepared for the things that are specific to each form.

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