I tend to use my iPhone more as a reading device for news and other material more than as a phone. I like books, but there's not always time for a long read. For printed matter, booklets are a great way to get a reading fix without worrying about dying phone batteries or long books. I'll pick up any stray booklets on counters in waiting rooms or wherever I happen to be and when the price is right, I'll even purchase certain booklets. From a consumer point-of-view, booklets are more interesting than brochures and when done right they deliver just the right amount of information plus marketing. And they come in all shapes and sizes.
Here's a round-up of tutorials on designing and using booklets. I dug through a lot of links purporting to be booklet design tutorials to find the ones I felt were most useful and most focused specifically on booklets.
- At ideabook.com Chuck Green writes about how to Create an out-of-the ordinary booklet. He has almost an entire alphabet's worth of tips and advice on booklet size, themes, fonts, color, and content.
- Also from Chuck, The simple, small booklet demonstrates how to create a 16-page booklet from a single sheet of paper. And not some huge sheet of paper either. It's a letter size sheet. (I did a 12-days of Christmas booklet using this method several years back.)
- From this site, explore binding methods for booklets. Saddle-stitched (or stapled) may be common but it's not the only way to go.
- Guidelines for Designing a Camera-Ready Booklet looks briefly at the printing side of booklets with some suggestions for paper size, margins, and creating a folded dummy.
- 6 Booklet Design Elements That Will Get Your Customers to Take You Seriously doesn't cover any new ground if you're familiar with basic design principles. However, it is aimed at the non-designer business owner who wants to promote his or her business with a booklet.
- For those who prefer a simple step-by-step approach, eHow has How to Design a Booklet in seven steps that covers the mechanics of creating the booklet, not the design side so much.
- The Digital Room blog displays 49 Beautiful Catalog and Booklet Designs Inspiration that shows off some of the many ways to approach a simple (and not so simple) booklet design. Not a tutorial, but an inspiration and brainstorming set of photographs of booklets.
- As a bonus +1 tutorial, this one (from me) looks at the parts of a book. Booklets are mini-books. You probably won't find all these parts in a booklet, but many of them can be (and often should be) part of your booklet design.
So what software will you be using for your booklet design? Check out the About.com Reader's Choice Awards nominees in some of our software categories to find your winner. Don't forget to vote.
- Best Software for Graphic Designers: Four of these will handle the layout and one is good for the photos you might include.
- Best Software for Business Professionals: Don't consider yourself a designer but want to create booklets for your business? These will do the job.
- Best Free Desktop Publishing Software: You can build you up a whole suite of page layout and graphics tools for making booklets for no money -- leaving you enough leftover to splurge on the paper and printing, perhaps?