Designing for multi page documents

Sooner or later, every business will have to produce a multi page document. It could be product brochure, a catalog, reference manual, etc. You may be struggling at how to put this all together when you don’t have either a professional designer on call, or the software to do it. Well I’m going to give you a quick intro into designing for multi page documents. If you are an experienced designer, don’t skip over this article as I’ll also be including guides to avoid the common mistakes that even you guys make.

Single or double sided printed pages

This matters quite a bit on how you lay out your framing items, such as page number placement and where you start new sections. For instance, page numbering traditionally is on the bottom outer corner of the page, and if you are designing for double sided printing, then the number is on the bottom right on odd number pages and on the bottom left on even number pages. Also tradition expects every chapter or major section to start on the right hand (odd numbered) page, so you may have to add in blank pages to keep that.

Decide how the item is going to be bound

This directly effects how you will lay out your document. If you are going to be edge binding, be it staples, comb (wire or plastic), or perfect (paperback), then you have to have wider margin on the bind edge. Double sided pages makes the wider bind margin have to be ‘mirrored’ to the inner margin on two page spread. This also applies to books that are center bound as you as you don’t need the wider inner margin that edge binding does but you have to allow for ‘page creap’ as sheets are stacked inside each other. I explain all of this in more detail in my post ‘Book terms for the non bibliofile’

Both siding and binding effects the number of pages you can have to pay for

A very common mistake that people make is not being aware that all ‘books’ have different natural page counts depending on how the pages are printed and bound. Single sided pages, you can have any number you like. Double sided will always be priced in steps of two, even if the last side is unused. Centre folded sheets are page counted in lots of 4, meaning if have a 10 page document you will be paying for 12 pages even if two of the pages are blanks. So you either add more content to fill up those spare pages or edit what you have down to fit in the next smaller lot.

Design or chose a template and stick to it

Why reinvent the wheel. There are hundreds of ready made book templates you can get for free that will ensure that your page layout, heading and paragraph styles are consistent and will help you automatically generate tables of contents and indexes if you need them. If you want to create your own unique look then even MS Word supports smart formatting to ensure you only need to set up one or two template pages and everything thereafter automatically formatted correctly. If you are unsure how to do it, there are countless written and video guides that can show you how to do it. I think spending a hour or two leaning how to use templates against spending countless hours manually formatting everything is a worthwhile investment.

Design for the page you want to see, not how you think we will print it

Often we get documents setup with two or more pages of a book setup on a single sheet. People do this because they design it for printing at home, or thinking that it will help us. In truth it doesn’t. We have very expensive software running our printers designed to generate correctly laid out books with a few mouse clicks that automatically give us the most cost effective printing and allows for how the material is going to be bound.. When we get ‘compiles’ we have to manually split the sheets into their logical pages for the software to work, adding a time cost and running the risk of errors creeping in as we ‘break’ the document. Just set them up as how you would read the finished pages and let us take care of the rest.

Puting content across the page split on a spread never works

This one I see time and time again from the professional designers. Spreads are when you open a book up and the left and right hand page form a greater area called a spread. Tools like inDesign make it easy to design for it, and infact does this by default. The problem is that every spread is made up of two different physical pages. Thanks to practical limitations, each printed page could have a position variance of half a millimeter in each direction, more if you have to allow for page creap. This means that your great design could be misaligned or missing a sliver of print, making a visible break that people will often see. There are visual tricks to get around it, but that takes a lot of planning in the outset, so make your life easier by just not doing it, or just accept the risk.

Turn off facing pages when making printing pdfs

Another one for the professionals designers out there. Image glitches can often occur if they have created pages with facing templates then just generate the pdf. What often comes out is a pdf where the bleed from one side of the spread ends up on the other. If you have a mixture of full bleed artwork through the document, this will result in strange little orphans bits of artwork turning up on pages where they don’t belong thanks to the vagaries of the printing process. The quickest way to avoid this just toggle off facing pages in the page settings before generating the pdf. Now each page will have it’s own distinct bleeds and orphans won’t happen. As a side benefit it also gives you a another way to check how consistent the design is.

Talk to Copy Express

This is the most important tip. Not only are we are more than happy to review documents and give you advice on how to make your work look better, but we offer a full design service if you are finding all too much to deal with. We are just a phone call or email away.