Zing Tip #8: Booklet Page Counts Matter

You are familiar with magazines and catalogs in which staples in the center fold hold the pages together. In the print industry, that’s known as a fold and saddle stitch. When designing a publication, be it a booklet or brochure, you have to do the math when deciding on the number of pages. That’s because a fold and saddle stitch requires the page count to be divisible by 4.

Let’s say you want an 8-page booklet with a finished size of 5.5”x8.5” after it is folded and stapled. Well that would use two sheets of 8.5”x11” sheets of paper. One side of a sheet holds two pages and the back side holds two pages. So for 8 pages you use two sheets of paper. For 12 pages, you use three sheets of paper and so on.

A 10-page document leaves you with a double-sided half sheet and that doesn’t work because it cannot be stapled into the center of a booklet. So you either need to expand to 12 pages (and you could employ blank pages if you want such as blank on the inside of the front and back cover pages). Or you need to edit down to 8 pages.

There are other ways to create multi-page printed pieces without the page count being divisible by 4. We will go over those in another Zing Tip or a blog post so watch for that.