I agree with you, PrintDriver—these dog photos look fine. Rabid? Not even close.
I’m late to this party but couldn’t hold back discussing print design. Plus I agree with previous design statements. 
(except for the ‘don’t use animals showing their teeth’ comment. I interned with a pet walking and sitting business. My boss was VERY cautious of which picture to use for similar reasoning but would not avoid showing teeth specifically. I could see her saying the small dog being held looks like “help me”.)
I assume this brochure was to be tri-folded. Hopefully it was designed appropriately with the inner page a little smaller than the other 2. This way it will fit nicely inside when hand or machine folded. Always do a fold test before printing all of them!
Also generally you don’t want to separate the panels with vertical lines and hard edges on photos. Definitely remove the vertical lines at least. When it comes time for someone to fold, designer or printer, it will be very difficult to get the crease on the line or edge of image every time.
For the cover page, I recommend picking a new image with white background or get a new image to flow through both panels. The panel with the dog in a box I would consider extending the background into the middle panel or adding 1/8" white border to that panel for the crease.
For the interior you could get away with only removing the vertical lines. Just be sure to add bleed, crop marks, and fold marks. As a former printer, those marks are gold when a designer sets them up right. Good luck!
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The icon in the logo reminds me of the cingular logo
Completely off-topic: Like bi-weekly, tri-fold confuses the hell out of me. Does that mean three panels, or four? Is there a difference between single-fold and bi-fold?
Not to be confused with Z-fold 
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That’s the way I’ve always used it — even though there are only two folds in a trifold. The trifold can either be a gate fold, a double gate fold or a z-fold (which is a three-panel, folded-twice accordion fold). Yeah, the terminology, now that I think about it, is confusing.
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If a designer makes seven tri-fold brochures bi-weekly, how many panels does he make in the month of June?
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Yea the names don’t quite make sense.
I hope this can be a helpful reference: https://solutions.teamavalon.com/blog/8-different-ways-to-fold-brochures
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I have to beg to differ, here, I’m afraid.
A good printer should be able to score and fold with enough accuracy that this is not a problem. Tiny variations (especially on an inside panel) would be accommodated by the fold itself anyway. Just make sure you have a printer that cares about this kind of thing. I have designed countless brochures with different coloured panels and my printer has never got it wrong.
Of course, if you use a budget printshop, it could cause a potential problem, but with a good printer, it shouldn’t be too much of an issue. In addition, the dynamic benefits of doing it, if you need a panel to be a call out from the flow of the rest of the brochure, is a useful device. If you don’t need to do it, then yes, you would eliminate the risk completely by not doing so, but personally, I would hate to lose the ability to do so, in terms of pacing a document sometimes.
That said, a different colour on each side, can give this effect because of the fold in third panel.
Bleed and small variations in crop are another matter, There is always going to be a small margin of error if a guillotine is cutting a few hundred sheets of paper in one go.
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If the scoring and folding is by hand then sure a printer can do it. But still I have folded on the lines or edges provided by the designer and often had to show the designer how the pages don’t line up without either shifting off the lines, redesigning the file, or sometimes simply trimming 1/16th off the interior page.
My best guess is you set up your file properly for printing and I have experienced amateur designers with improper files.
Yes, my print shop is a budget friendly business. I don’t know much about the machinery… I think they have great laser printers but I can’t say I’m confident in their folding machine’s accuracy. Hand folding is available but at a time tracked price… Not worth it.
Ok I could see that as long as the file is set up correctly for print and fold. Maybe on his exterior pages keep the sections separate to further draw the eye but I think the interior it’s not necessary. What do you think?
Yes! Its less often the cut though. Paper can shift as it’s pulled by the printer. (This is much more likely with any coated paper, especially double-sided gloss.) The first and last prints can end up printing centimeters different from each other. Bleed is so vital to counter this issue!!
Centimeters on a trifold? A good printer should be able to keep any shift that would affect the bleed to under 3mm. Large format work, of course, needs a larger bleed as does, sometimes, web presses, but for sheetfed offset or digital, 3mm should be more than enough.
As for color blocks aligning with folds in brochures, as has been mentioned, the artwork needs to be set up correctly with fold marks added to the file to indicate exactly where the fold should occur. Any good printer should have tight enough tolerances on their machinery to hit it within a millimeter. Typically, though, I’ll run the color about a millimeter over the fold since I’ve found that preferable to running the risk of a sliver of white paper appearing on an otherwise solid color panel.
I think if you give the dogs showing teeth braces, we’ll all be ok with it
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So sorry! I definitely went overboard saying centimeters but we have had as bad half an inch. I can’t say if it was a trifold or what but not to worry. I really may not have been working at a great shop. We regularly needed to call in technicians for our printers. Also I’m not trying to say designers should add larger bleed. 1/8" to 1/4" bleed all around the image goes a long way 
Yes! I forgot about this. This helps a lot. It can be tough to be sure not to cut too deep or not have cut enough. Often we do ‘hairline’ cuts to have the machine slice off the tiniest sliver of paper.
B is talking about running a color block across a fold by 1mm rather than on it, so a sliver of white doesn’t show on the color block panel, but a sliver of color will cross the fold. Nothing to do with the trim.
Sorry I understood but I definitely went on a tangent.
Thank you for clarifying.
I agree the cover needs to tell you more about what the product is. The dog with the teeth seems fine to me. I love the dog on the back with the floppy ear - very endearing. Overall I think it is clean and smart
So do I. The problem is that designers have to ask themselves:
“How can dumb people misconstrue my intentions?” [of my design elements]
Yes. It’s called psychology lol.
A perfect example: 7 million catalogues go out. I have a Monotone image of a couple having cappuccinos faded into the back. We get 100’s of complaints (mainly from Utah*) that they don’t like that the couple is drinking beer. Because the mugs were clear and one could see the normal cappuccino foam, 100s of idiots (to use the Greek) took time out of their day to call our home office. If you get 100’s of complaints, you lose your client.
So, do YOU want to be responsible for reprint costs incurred by your client/company because the world has stupid people in it? Of course not.
You don’t design for you. You design for sales. If your design loses customers, you lose clients. <—period.
The world is filled with stupid people with terrible opinions. This is not my opinion, but a lesson learned the hard way.
*not sayin’, just sayin.