Design a Fold-Out City Guide in Adobe InDesign ~ KrobKnea

Final product image — What You'll Be Creating

Designing a print document that’s going to be folded can be tricky, but in this tutorial we look at how you can make it ultra simple... and fun!

In this tutorial suitable for beginners to InDesign, you’ll learn how to create an easy-peasy fold-out city guide that can expand from a pocket-friendly size to an A3 sheet, complete with map, key and insider travel tips. You can easily adapt the design to your own city of choice.

You’ll need access to Adobe InDesign, and, optionally, Adobe Illustrator. Let’s get started!

1. Visualizing Folds

Incorporating folds into a print design can be a great idea. Folded documents save space on the shelf, and give the reader an element of surprise when they expand the design. However, designing print documents with folds can be tricky and a little daunting to a print design beginner.

But it needn’t be scary! Whenever you create a document that’s going to be printed and folded, such as a fold-out flyer or brochure, you can help to create your design in 2D by trying to visualize the final product. Let’s take a look at how we can do that with our fold-out guide. We're going to be creating a two-sided fold-out brochure, with a Concertina fold three times and then a cross fold in half.

Step 1

First, we need to set up the basic layout of the document in InDesign.

So, get InDesign opened up and go to File > New > Document.

In the New Document window that opens, set the Intent to Print and increase theNumber of Pages to 2. Uncheck Facing Pages.

From the Page Size drop-down menu, select A3.

Switch the orientation to Landscape by clicking the icon to the far right side of the window, along from the Width text box.

Under Columns, set the Number to 2, and the Gutter to 0 mm. This will divide the pages into two equal sections.

Set the Margins on all sides to 14 mm, and, as we’re creating a document for print, set the Bleed on all sides to 5 mm.

Click OK to create the new two-page document.

Step 2

To be able to fold the guide up, we need to mark out the location of the folds. We can do this by placing Guides on the document’s Master page, dividing the page up into equal sections.

From the Pages panel (Window > Pages) double-click on the A-Master page icon to bring up the Master on screen.

Ensure that you can see the rulers running along the left side and top of the workspace (View > Show Rulers), and then from the left-hand ruler, click and drag to pull out a vertical guide. Keep pulling out until the guide is at X position 315 mm.

Pull out a second vertical guide to 105 mm. The page is now divided up into four tall, equal sections.

From the ruler running along the top of the workspace, pull down a single horizontal guide to the center point of the page, at Y position 148.5 mm.

The page is now divided up into eight equal sections.

Step 3

A very important thing to remember when designing fold-out documents is to make sure that the margins are equal for each folded section of the document.

You don’t want to end up with a folded section looking like this...

... just because you didn’t allow enough space for the margins all around the perimeter of the section. You want each section to be able to stand alone and look good, like this instead:

We can add more guides to the Master to mark out these extra margins. Remember that the outside margins are set at 14 mm. We’ll therefore need to create double-margins (28 mm in width) around each fold line, to give the content equal space on each section bordered by a fold.

Remain on the A-Master page, and drag a guide out from the left-hand ruler to X position 91 mm. Drag a second guide out to X position 119 mm, so you have a pair of vertical guides evenly spaced around the first fold on the left-hand side of the page.

Hold down Shift and click to select both of the guides you’ve just created. Go to Edit > Copy and Edit > Paste. Position the pasted pair of guides around the central fold. Repeat the Copy/Paste process a third time, and wrap this third pair of guides around the vertical fold on the right side of the page.

Then pull down a horizontal guide from the top ruler to Y position 134.5 mm, and another guide down to Y position 162.5 mm.

Your A-Master page should look like this (the new ‘margin’ guides are highlighted in red):

Step 4

OK, so we’ve added both fold lines and margin lines to our document, and because these are simply InDesign guides they won’t appear on the final printed document.

But how will content be arranged on our travel guide? It’s difficult to tell from just looking at this 2D layout.

The best thing to do is to take a piece of A3 paper and fold it, writing down on each visible section as you fold and expand it what content should appear where, and which direction the content needs to face.

To help you along, this is what I managed to create once I’d experimented with folding my A3 sheet. This shows the ‘front’ of the guide when folded, i.e. what you’d see when you first pick up the guide. Then you’d fold out the guide once to see the ‘reverse’ of the guide.

Then you’d go ahead and unfold the whole guide, expanding it to its full A3 size. This image shows the ‘Reverse’ side of the guide when expanded, and the way it would be folded. Solid red lines indicate an outwards (bevelled) fold and dashed red lines show an inwards (embossed) fold.

On the other side of the guide, which we’ll call the ‘inside’, you have a whole A3 sheet to play around with.

2. Organize the Guide’s Content Into Layers

Now that we’ve successfully ‘visualized’ what the guide will look like when folded and expanded, we can start to put together the design of the guide.