Brochures, leaflets and pamphlets are an essential marketing tool for many businesses, and are typically used by companies to promote and showcase their products or services. There are many different options for publishing and printing brochures open to the customer.

As brochures are an advertising and marketing tool, it is important that companies take plenty of time and effort to ensure that they look as good as possible and are professionally put together and printed. Design can be done either by an in-house graphic designer, or many printing firms offer this service in addition to basic printing. It is crucial to spend time over the design and make sure that the brochure is perfect and presents the best image possible for the company concerned before moving on to the printing stage. Proofreading and careful checking of details must be carried out at this stage as any errors cannot be corrected at a later stage of production.

Once the client is satisfied with the layout, colour scheme, photographs and text in their brochure, decisions about the brochure printing can be made. For a small run of simple brochures which do not require complicated folding and stapling, this can be done on a good quality colour printer in the office or at home. This method is time consuming though, and might not produce as good results as professional printing on an industrial scale on a printing press. It is a viable option though for the individual or small business only needing to produce a few simple brochures on an infrequent basis.

For the larger enterprise, requiring a print run of brochures which might extend into thousands of units, professional printing is the only option. There are many small printing firms who specialise in turning concepts into printed reality for small companies. Modern printing is done using the four colour process, where the images are separated into the four colours of cyan, magenta, yellow and black which are then layered to produce the finished product. With digital printing, images can be manipulated, enlarged, shrunk or moved around on the brochure right up until the moment the print run is started.

Decisions about what paper to use must also be made at this stage. Lightweight paper will be cheaper but the result may be less professional and more flimsy. Using a good quality glossy paper will give a more durable finish and may project a higher quality image in the finished brochure. Coloured paper or card could also be considered to make the brochure stand out from others printed on standard white paper.

Once the brochure printing process is complete, the brochures are either folded or stapled, depending on the size and finish required by the client. Most printers have machinery to do this, avoiding the need for completing the laborious process by hand. If the brochure is particularly large and thick, it is generally bound like a paperback book rather than stapled as this makes it less likely to come apart.