Booklets are a resourceful presentation of essential details for a business, academic project, and so much more. With the digital age causing the attention span of most readers to decrease, a sharp booklet design makes it easier for you to use this medium to your advantage.
On a few pages, you can capture and promote content in an attractive and succinct way. This makes it important to not only know what a booklet is, but also to understand how to do booklet design for printing.
Reasons for a Booklet Design Printing Project
Generally, printed booklets come in various forms for a wide range of use. Additionally, customizing your booklet design enhances the uniqueness of your business brand. In more ways than one, building your identity can demonstrate your industry expertise.
Many new advertising channels, such as videos, podcasts, and social media, are used for modern marketing practices. However, booklet design remains a tried and true traditional marketing and communication tool.
Some reasons to consider a booklet design printing project as part of your marketing strategy include:
- Organize large amounts of information in a digestible and visually appealing document
- Distribute valuable information to your target audience
- Give conference-goers, potential clients or customers something to reference later
- Fill lobby racks, kiosks, or countertop displays
- Market to and educate current and potential customers about your products and services
Outstanding Booklet Design
Booklets are a cost-effective option, whether for a child’s school project or eye-catching marketing material for a business. What does not change is how you design your booklet before going to print.
Follow these five steps to avoid printing delays and to ensure every page looks exactly how you envisioned.
Step 1: Know Your Audience
As you begin drafting the booklet design and layout, think about your target audience. What type of information about your business do they need? What attracts them to read printed material versus an online file?
Use data from the demographic profile you developed when starting your business. This invaluable information can help you center content around the important aspects of your business. Doing so helps to ensure you can reach all audiences with the same message.
Knowing your audience also speaks to the images you select. Poor quality images will diminish the quality of printing results. Choose what will keep your audience turning the pages.
Many websites offer free and royalty-free stock pictures. You may even find copyrighted photos that fill the creative needs of your booklet design. The terms of service will explain the rules and regulations for using the images that you choose.
Step 2: Outline the Contents for Your Booklet Design
Another important consideration as you begin your booklet design is to know what you want to say and how you want it said. Even though a booklet is a relatively small document, outlining the contents is worth the time and effort.
An outline gives you a clear vision of what you want readers to learn. Typically, the content should be conversational while focusing on what your business has to offer. Using an outline can serve as a guide so you remove any fluff that may turn readers away.
Remember, you want to hold your readers’ attention once they decide to pick up your booklet. Often, people will skim the booklet, looking for interesting headlines and photos. Along with written copy, some aspects to consider in your outline include:
- Captions
- Bulleted lists
- Logos
- Facts and numbers
- Pull quotes
Keep paragraphs short and succinct. Organize the content by sections or chapters depending on the length of your booklet. A long booklet will require more work and possibly more than one draft to ensure the content flows.
Step 3: Customize Pages
Customizing pages is a simple and technical part of a booklet printing project. There are several print-ready things you need to do to design your booklet. For starters, the count and arrangement of pages need to be considered so you don’t delay production times.
When you customize booklet pages, you want to make sure your content stands out from the competition. Therefore, it is important to organize content by page sections. This helps to make it easier for you to focus on one page without forgetting the big picture.
Applying the same layout to multiple pages can help simplify the amount of work it will take to get a finished product. For instance, you want the same layout for all pages within each chapter.
This way, your booklet design maintains a rhythm that gives readers an easy structure to follow.
As you prepare your booklet design for printing, do not overlook the inside front and back covers. If you do not want anything printed on these pages, include them as blank pages in consecutive order within the file you send to the printer.
Step 4: Select the Right Binding for Your Booklet Design
There are many options from which to choose a binding for your booklet printing project. Your choice will depend on the style and function that you prefer. Having an understanding of the various kinds of available binding for booklets can help to make your decision easier.
Saddle Stitching
A common method for binding booklets up to 80 pages. Basically, large sheets are folded in half and stapled on the spine to ensure they remain in place. Often used for smaller magazines and catalogs, this form of binding is perfect for booklets.
Perfect Binding
As a popular form of securing your printed pages, perfect binding is an excellent choice for a variety of booklet design projects. Perfect binding is often used on softcover books and paperback books found in bookstores.
If you need to print annual reports or other collections of documents, perfect binding gets the job done to keep all of the pages together. The finished product can be stacked easily at a conference or industry trade show.
Additionally, a professional printing company can print your booklet with a long-lasting, elegant look.
Wire-o and Plastic Coil Binding
If you need an affordable option to design your booklet for printing, consider using wire-o or plastic coil binding. This method works well with small to mid-sized booklet printing projects. This popular form of binding also works for calendars.
With these binding methods, the pages in your booklet can lay side-by-side on flat surfaces to make it easy for your audience to read.
Page Counts
The page count of your booklet printing project determines the type of binding to use. This makes beginning the design phase with the printing style in mind. You want to get the best result from the finished product.
If you decide to use saddle stitching, you will need to design your booklet in increments of four pages. One sheet of paper is printed with two pages on each side, then folded in half.
To avoid blank pages in the finished booklet printing project, make sure that the final page count is divisible by four.
The page count rules change with other methods. Perfect bound, plastic coil, and wire-o binding uses single pages that are not folded. Documents are printed front and back, and should have a final page count that is divisible by two.
Step 5: Use Consistent Design Elements
Consistency is a primary rule to remember as you design your booklet for printing. The last thing you want is to have marketing material that is unprofessional. It is better to format the booklet to make it cohesive with your business brand.
Therefore, be consistent with a number of design elements, such as:
- Fonts
- Colors
- Visuals
- Spacing
- Page margins
Keep the number of fonts to no more than two: one for the titles and one for the paragraphs. Readability and consistency are extremely important to a good booklet design. Too many fonts cause confusion and distraction for your readers.
Also, decide on a color palette that will compliment any visuals you add to the booklet. This will prove very useful as you work on the layouts.
Ready, Set, Print!
You are not alone when it comes to finding innovative ways to save money and still deliver crisp messages to your audience. Whether you need 100 or 10,000 copies, a booklet printing project is an affordable way to accomplish marketing goals.
The key is to partner with a professional printer that can match your expectations. From design to turnaround time and durability, you want a full-service booklet printer. You have found that printer with Dazzle Printing. To get pricing for your booklet, check out our instant calculators.
