Brochure Design Tip:
Help! How wide will the spine be on my brochure or catalogue?
If your brochure or catalogue is to be perfect bound, it’s possible you want to add text to the spine. Perhaps your brochure / catalogue might need to fit inside something else – a presentation folder or an envelope? Perhaps you’re concerned about direct mail restrictions and you need to ensure your brochure will mail for the lowest cost?
In any case, you’ll need to know how to calculate the width of the spine. It’s not as complicated as you might think, but to be accurate you need to know the thickness of the paper in microns, rather than the weight of the paper (gsm):
Multiply the number of leaves (not printed pages) by the thickness of the paper (in microns). Add up to 1mm to allow for the thickness of the cover.
An example:
64 pages (32 leaves) + 4 page cover with the text section page thickness of 150 microns = 32 x 0.15 = 4.8, plus 1mm for cover = 5.8mm
Remember that if your publication uses sections made from different papers you’ll need to do each calculation separately and add them together.
If you’re stuck, send an email and we’ll do our best to help.