Design Tips For Saddle Stitched Booklets

Many businesses use printed booklets and brochures as a major part of their marketing and advertising campaigns – these printed booklets can highlight your company’s products and services and provide information about your business to reinforce your company image and raise the corporate profile of your business. These booklets are often printed to a very high-quality and are presented with a saddle stitched finish for that professional, high-end aesthetic – here are some aspects of the design process of your booklet for you to consider:

Saddle Stitched Books

Saddle stitching refers to the type of binding method in which a booklet’s pages are held together and displayed – saddle stitching is a cost effective and simple binding method where the printed pages are folded and secured together with staples.

General Design Considerations

As saddle stitched booklets open flat, graphics can be displayed across a full spread providing you with more options to create spectacular and vibrant visuals throughout your booklet. You should consider the required size – A3, A4, A5 – and the format you want your pages to appear – landscape or portrait – and don’t be afraid to get creative with the paper type you use for your document. There is a plethora of paper choices from recycled, silk, and gloss right through to luxury coated finish paper types for that truly stunning aesthetic and texture that could elevate your booklet to something very special!

Planning

Saddle stitched booklets need careful planning in the design stage – despite the relatively simple concept of interlocked folded sheets held by wire staples, the design set-up requires a different approach than for other bound book types – here are some considerations with regards to saddle stitched booklet printing and design:

  • Multiples of Four – As saddle stitched booklets are constructed of folded sheets, each of the sheets joined within the finished booklet will make-up four pages. As such, the final page count of the booklet MUST always be a multiple of four – even a blank page will count in the overall calculation. This means that you cannot have a saddle stitched booklet with an odd number of pages – they will always contain 4, 8, 12, 16, 20 pages and so on with multiples of four.
  • Reader Spreads – In creating the layout of the booklet you will need to consider the reader spreads – these show the order in which the pages will appear in the final booklet so position the pages in ascending numerical order.
  • Printer Spreads – Printer spreads differ from reader spreads in that they display the booklet’s pages as they will actually print, so will NOT be in numerical order, but arranged in the positions that allow for them to be printed to eventually appear in numerical order once printed, folded and bound in the saddle stitched booklet.

If your business is based in the south of England and you are interested in finding out more about booklet printing in Bexleyheath or the surrounding areas, then speak with Enigma Print and Design Ltd. They are an established and respected family-run, business print company offering the highest quality saddle stitched booklets in Bexleyheath, along with all manner of corporate printed materials for businesses of any size and sector. 

Enigma Print and Design

If you’d like more advice and help, are searching for business card printing in Dartford, or an online print shop, then we can help. Contact our friendly team to see what we can do for you.