How to Choose a Brochure Color Palette That Prints True

Color does one job before anyone reads a word: it decides whether the piece gets picked up. A brochure in a rack shows roughly its top four inches, a brochure on a table is judged from three or four feet away, and a mailed brochure competes with everything else in the stack. At that distance type is a grey texture. Only value and hue are legible.

That is why the useful question is not which colors look nice together. It is which colors survive being seen small, at an angle, under fluorescent light, next to a competitor. A pale sage cover with soft grey type can be beautiful on a monitor and completely invisible in a lobby rack.

The second job is recognition. When the same three colors run across your brochures, your flyers and your postcards, a customer who saw one piece recognizes the next one before reading the logo. That only works if the colors are pinned to real CMYK values rather than re-picked by eye each time, which is where a written palette earns its keep.

Contrast is measurable, so measure it. Hold body copy at a ratio of 4.5 to 1 against whatever sits behind it, and large display type at 3 to 1. Any contrast checker gives you the number in a second, and it removes the argument about whether the grey is too light.

Print needs more headroom than a screen. Paper is not pure white, ink spreads a little into the sheet, and a brochure gets read under whatever light the room has. A pair that squeaks past 4.5 to 1 on a calibrated monitor can be uncomfortable on uncoated stock. Aim a notch higher than the minimum and you will never think about it again.

• Reversed type needs weight. White copy out of a dark field wants roughly 9 point and up in a medium or semibold weight. Thin serifs at 7 point fill in as the ink spreads, and the fine strokes disappear.
• Never set body copy straight onto a photograph. Put it on a solid panel, or on the photo behind a flat block of color. Partial transparency over a busy image gives you a different contrast ratio in every square inch.
• Watch mid-tone on mid-tone. Two colors of similar lightness can look distinct at arm reach and merge into one grey at rack distance. Convert the pair to greyscale to test it.
• Coating changes the read. Gloss deepens the darks and adds glare, matte softens the darks and kills glare. The matte and gloss comparison covers which one suits which job.

Type size and color are one decision, not two, so set them together. The brochure font and size guide gives the sizes that hold up at the weights above.

Every hue you add is another thing that has to survive the conversion to CMYK, another thing to check on the printed proof, and another decision the reader has to process in the second they give you. Restraint here is not minimalism for its own sake. It is fewer failure points.

When a layout genuinely needs more variety, take it from value rather than hue. A single support color at 20, 40, 70 and 100 percent gives you four distinct steps that stay perfectly on brand and stay in gamut, since a tint of an in-gamut color is always reproducible. Panel coding on a trifold works far better in tints of one hue than in three unrelated colors, and the piece still reads as one object rather than three pamphlets stapled together.

Two habits keep a palette honest through a long project. Cap the accent by counting it: if the accent appears more than four or five times on a spread, it stopped being an accent. And keep one color out entirely, usually a second warm hue, so there is somewhere to go when a future piece needs to feel different without leaving the system. The elements of brochure design shows how the restrained palette works alongside the grid and the type.

A brochure is not a flat rectangle. It is a set of panels the reader opens in a fixed order, and the palette has to work at each step: the cover alone, the first opening, then the full inside spread.

Give the cover panel the strongest statement. That is the panel the dominant and the support colors are really designed for, and it is the only panel that has to work in a rack. Then let the inside spread go quiet, with the pale dominant carrying most of it and the support color reduced to headers and rules. A brochure that shouts on every panel gives the reader nowhere to land.

• Anything colored that touches a fold or a trim edge needs full bleed. Extend it 0.125 inch past the trim so a small shift in cutting never leaves a white sliver along the edge.
• Do not run a thin colored stripe across a fold. Folding tolerance is around a sixteenth of an inch, so a two point rule that crosses the fold will visibly step. A thick band absorbs the same shift invisibly.
• Panel widths are not equal on a trifold. The panel that tucks inside is cut slightly narrower so the piece closes flat, which means a color block centered on the flat artboard sits off center once folded. Set up from a blank brochure template rather than dividing the page in three.
• Heavy ink can crack on the fold. A solid dark field folded across the grain on heavier cover stock can show a hairline of white paper. Scoring before folding is what prevents it, and it matters most on the darkest color in your palette.
• Leave the mailing panel light. If the brochure is going in the mail, the address area needs a pale background so the address scans cleanly. See mailing brochures for the panel layout.

Which panels you get depends on the fold, so pick the fold before you finalize the color map. The fold types guide lays out the options, and you can start the layout in our online designer or from a downloadable template.