Here’s an idea for a pocket-sized booklet that you can make from a single sheet of A4 paper. It’s included in Christian Deakin’s Designing a Newsletter, subtitled ‘The really, really, really easy step-by-step guide for absolute beginners of all ages’.
He gives it as an example of pagination but it appealed to me as a format that I could find a use for. Perhaps simply popping a series of related sketches into a sequence.
Or, if you couldn’t quite get started on your first novel, you could pop in some linked text boxes and write a really, really, really short story.
In Design
I’m gradually getting myself back into booklet producing mode so I’ve taken this as an opportunity to become more familiar with Adobe InDesign, adjusting margins and guides and adding a non-printing guide layer.
I noticed that when printing in duplex mode on my HP Laserjet that in the printer options I need to set ‘Layout’ to ‘Two-Sided; Short-Edge Binding’, otherwise one side of the sheet doesn’t tally with the other.
Laser printers aren’t designed for millimetre perfect registration and, although I could probably tweak my guide boxes to allow for the thickness of the folded paper, I think the best thing to do will be to allow a generous margin of error around the content of each page.