Design a leaflet

One of the easiest ways to publicise your business is with a leaflet. These are surprisingly simple to make and fold using a regular home/office printer.

In our previous Affinity Publisher tutorial (AP 5 March) we started to explore some of this software’s more advanced text and design tools. This time we’re going to take it a step further and design a leaflet for our fictional photographic business.

Leaflets are simpler to design than you might imagine, both in terms of their layout and their physical form. You can print them yourself or get them printed commercially. Our design uses a single sheet of A4 paper in a landscape format with two vertical folds to produce what some would call a ‘tri-fold’ leaflet in that it offers three vertical panels, or ‘pages’ on one side and three on another.

Actually, you can fold this a couple of ways using a zigzag or ‘z’ fold, or a ‘roll fold’ where the right and left panels fold over the centre panel.

If all this sounds a bit complicated, don’t worry, because once you get your head around the layout it’s an easy home DIY job. The business cards we created in our first instalment (AP 20 February) might need a commercial print bureau to produce them, but printing leaflets is something you can do at home. Or, if you decide you need a few hundred rather than a few dozen (business must be good!) then your local print shop can advise.

With both of our folding examples, the front of our leaflet, or its cover, will be the right-most panel on the front. We’ve already introduced Frame Text, Artistic Text and Picture Frames in previous instalments in this series, and our cover is based on many of the elements we used in our previous poster design.