A commercially printed publicity material is a combination of the aspects of well-written text and beautifully rendered designs. At the very least, a commercial printing product must look good and compelling, because anything less than this would not do in marketing your brand or your company. That reliable commercial printing company is there to give a hand in the design process is usually taken for granted by commercial printing companies, which is a shame, really, because one of the most basic things commercial printing customers must understand is how to culminate choices of text, fonts, colors, decorations, etc. into a finished commercial printing product.
First, let us consider the textual aspect of your commercial printing product, whether it is a flyer, poster, business card, or any other printing product. Of course there is no single rule that governs how much space your text fills up-because it all depends on your purpose and goals-but a good basis to follow is to make sure that your text is big enough and fills enough space just to be perfectly readable. Any larger and the text would saturate the print and make it seem too obnoxious and demanding, and any smaller might make the information you print in harder to read and understand. Font type, size, and color are also important things to consider in balancing out your print design, so make sure that the choices you make will complement your choices regarding the images, illustrations, and other additional design.
As for the more graphic aspect of the design process, its purpose is to effectively capture and hold on to the attention of customers and clients but without smothering the text into being ignored. A good graphic design is beautiful but it should not be the sole center of attention, so keep this in mind before you go crazy with all of your decorations and color splashes. Remember that a minimalist design is still considered a design and may be even more effective in meshing with whatever text you want to print on your product. Again, color and motif must be taken into consideration so that they would not clash with the font colors and effects used for the texts.
Taken altogether, the basic rule of thumb is that your print should neither have too much text or too much design which would render your product unfit for public dissemination either way. Percentages may differ-50/50, 60/40, 70/30, etc.-but for sure, whatever your use for the commercial printing product, there is an advisable ratio between the amount of text and the amount of graphics you use. Do some research on this so that you would know what to use.
A lot of commercial printing products are ruined either because of too much text or too much graphics. What customers of commercial printing companies should do is to exert the effort in learning how to instinctively separate these two aspects as well as to bring them together for the final product, even if the design process would be primarily assigned to your commercial printer. After all, this is a good skill to have, because it may be used outside the commercial printing context.