Where to find inspiration for your brochure templates?

The brochure or the magazine are excellent communication tools to make your company known, spread your brand image and present your offer.

However, creating this type of communication support includes a graphic creation phase that is not within the reach of everyone. To help you during this creation phase, we suggest you review some sources of inspiration for your brochure templates.

At first glance, having an eye on what your direct competitors are doing can be a good source of inspiration for creating your brochure templates. However, as we will see, you have to be careful not to cross the line between "getting inspired" and "copying" the competition to avoid many risks. Finally, in this article, we offer you 4 sources of inspiration for your brochure templates that we hope will allow you to simply create original communication tools that are consistent with your brand image.

Take inspiration from the competition to create your brochure templates

There are three good reasons to take inspiration from the competition to create your own brochure templates:

• First, capitalize on the design work that has been done by others in brochure templates. Your competitors have spent time and money designing their brochure templates. They may have used graphic designers and marketers. It would be a shame not to capitalize on the work of these experts to create your own brochure templates.

Stapled brochure printing involves not only written content, but also often illustrations, color choices, paper type, lamination, etc. Pay attention to every detail in order to better choose from the many possibilities at your disposal.

• Secondly, of course, it is always a good idea to keep an eye on your competitors: what media do they use? What arguments do they put forward? What graphic identity have they chosen?

These questions can help you to better understand their communication strategy and to build your own.

For example, if you have in mind to design an 8-page magazine to promote your offer to your customers and partners, it is very useful to take the time to read the ones produced by the actors of your activity sector in order to get inspired to create your own brochure templates.

• Third, by carefully studying your competitors' brochure templates, you have the opportunity to put yourself in your future readers' shoes. You will quickly spot the brochures that, in your opinion, work or not: those that catch your eye, those that hold your attention and make you want to read or, on the contrary, those that fall out of your hands or whose reading direction you do not understand.

This information is very important when designing your own staple-bound documents. Take the time to write down your impressions and then compare them with your graphic desires and business needs.

Don't copy the competition when creating your brochure templates

But be careful not to confuse inspiration with plagiarism! Here are 4 reasons why you need to be very careful when you take inspiration from the competition to create your own brochure templates:

• What works for your competitors, will not necessarily work for you!

Even if you work in the same industry or offer similar products, you and your competitors do not necessarily target the same clientele, the same business objectives or the same geographical deployment. For this reason, be careful not to copy their brochure templates, as this is not the way to achieve your own goals!

• Your competitors may not be so strong.

From the outside, you like your competitors' brochure templates. But you have no real proof of their long-term effectiveness. Their current growth may only be cyclical or based on their reputation. This says nothing about the effectiveness of their brochure templates.

• Build a strategy in relation to your resources.

Copying your competitors' brochure templates requires the same financial and human resources. However, perhaps you don't have as many resources to devote to your own brochure templates, in which case you will only obtain a pale copy of a beautiful competing brochure. Or, on the contrary, maybe you have internal resources that your competitors do not have, which would allow you to create an original brochure template perfectly adapted to your strategy.

• Know your competition to stand out from the crowd.

By consulting the brochure templates of other companies in your sector, you can collect their arguments on products similar to yours. This information collection can be a clever way to understand how to distinguish yourself from your competition by enriching their base with your company's values, but perhaps also by using different arguments.

4 sources of inspiration for your brochure templates

You have the ambition to create a 32-page magazine that subtly presents your activity, your values, your points of differentiation and your main products to your customers. You want to create a unique, elegant and pleasant to read magazine. For this, there is no lack of inspiration:

You will find on search engines such as Google image for example, many brochure templates. The ease with which you can consult them allows you to conduct a fast and efficient benchmark. You can then determine what you like and include it in your own project.

• Image banks such as Canva, Envato, venngage, flipsnack or freepik are full of brochure templates that will be a source of inspiration. Some of these image banks, such as Canva, Envato and venngage, even offer to modify the brochure templates directly on their interface to customize it to your colors and your identity.
• Social networks can also be good sources of inspiration - as long as you don't get lost! Pinterest is a good example of a network where you can look at a lot of free brochure templates. It is possible to create collections in order to keep the results of your search when designing your own brochure templates.
• Collecting brochures found in your mailbox, distributed at trade shows, distributed in stores, etc. also allows you to build a useful database. When these brochure templates come from your competitors, they will allow you to identify their arguments, perhaps to use some of them, perhaps on the contrary to distinguish yourself from the competition. When these brochure templates are not related to your own activity or project, you will have kept them only because you like them. It is then useful to conduct an analysis to verify that the elements that interest you in these brochures could usefully serve your brochure template projects

There are many sources of inspiration for creating your brochure templates. We hope you find these suggestions useful and that we will soon have the pleasure of printing your brochures.