- When you're building a piece
that's going to fold up
like this three-paneled brochure,
you have to take into consideration how paper behaves
when it's folded.
Now, I'm not talking about complex paper behavior,
just some simple geometry.
This is a four inch by nine inch rack brochure.
It's a common size of brochure.
You'll find them in hotels,
tourist information centers,
doctor's offices,
and many other locations.
Let's take a look at the panel sizes.
The outside front cover and the back cover
are both four inches wide.
But the third panel,
because it has to fold inside,
has to be a bit narrower.
How much?
Well, that actually depends on the thickness
of the paper stock,
but it's fairly standard
for that short trim
to be between 3/32 of an inch
and an eighth of an inch.
I've opted to shave off an eighth of an inch,
so my third panel is 3 7/8 inches wide.
A common mistake when creating something like this
is that a designer just makes the three panels
the same size.
What would happen if the job were printed
and cut to that set trim size,
and then folded?
Well, because all panels are the same size,
the piece would buckle.
Trying to force it flat would wrinkle the brochure.
That wouldn't be pretty.
If the brochure is built
with three panels of equal width,
the printer,
in the interest of being able to fold the piece,
might just go ahead
and lop off that extra 1/8 of an inch.
But look what happens to the artwork in that case.
The nice uniform white border
around the artwork is no longer intact.
And then that leaves the image
and the text block off-center in that panel.
Now there are additional considerations.
You have to be careful placing artwork
and text too close to a fold.
Now here, the artwork on the cover
and the back cover stop precisely at the fold.
If you try to manually fold something like this,
you know how tough it can be
to fold it right on that line.
But modern finishing equipment is capable
of very tight precision.
So you really don't need to worry about that.
But what I would caution you about
is placing text too close
to a fold or a trim edge.
It can just look awkward.
And that's why it's a good idea
to stay within a designated live area
on each panel, really just for visual appeal
I've inherited a document that somebody created
with the intention of creating a three-panel brochure,
and all the artwork's in place
and that's great,
but they forgot to short trim
the panel that's going to fold in.
So here this on the right
is going to be my cover.
Here's my back cover.
And here's my fold in panel.
So I need to narrow this panel.
This is really easy, though.
All I have to do is get my page tool,
click on that page,
and now that's targeted.
And if you look up in the control panel
you can see that I have my proxy here,
and all I had to do
is pin down the right side of this panel
so that it doesn't wander off
from the other pages,
and InDesign will let me do the math right here
in the panel,
just minus 0.125,
but you can see that that causes a problem.
I have a nice uniform white border around this artwork,
and I've lost that
because of the size reduction
but that's going to be easy to fix.
I'll just switch to my black arrow,
click on that artwork,
drag that into the live area,
and I'm good.
But I need to have this text block centered.
My smart guides are going to help me out.
I'll just drag until I see that highlighter.
There we go.
Now I have to do the mirror of that on the inside.
In that case,
this page on the right is my short trim panel.
I'm just going to do the same thing
with one modification.
I'll get my page tool.
I'll click on the page.
And then up here in my control panel,
I'll click down the left side
so that I pin down the left side of that panel.
Again, I'm going to let InDesign do the math,
and there we go.
And as I had to do on the front,
I'll just have to modify these frames a little bit.
I'm going to grab this one and center it.
There we go, and I'm done.
It would've been nice
if the designer had done that
as they were building this,
but luckily their design is nice and simple,
and it was easy for me to fix.
So anytime you create something that folds,
it's a good idea to create a mock-up.
Just take a piece of paper,
fold it up the way that it's going to go.
It can be approximate.
Mark the panel
so you know who's who,
and you'll be able to quickly figure out
where your short trim panels are.
And generally speaking,
an 1/8 of an inch is fine.
You might ask your printer
if they like another dimension
for short trimming.
They may even have a template
that they'll let you use
as you begin the document.
But in this case,
I didn't have the luxury of that.
I had to do it after the fact,
but you see how simple it is.