When designing a booklet for your next print marketing campaign, think about the different options available to you for the type of booklet you’d have printed. Two common options include saddle stitch booklets and perfect bound booklets. It’s worth exploring and understanding the difference between the two to make the best choice for when it’s your turn to design a booklet for your print marketing campaign.
What’s in a Name?
The terms saddle stitch and perfect bound refer to how the pages of the booklet are put together. Saddle stitch booklets are arranged together and folded into the shape of the booklet (while placed on a device called a saddle) and stapled (stitched) through the fold to hold the pages together. It’s a simple, cost-effective way to get ideas together into a booklet, and is intended for booklets less than 76 pages.
Perfect bound booklets usually feature a cover that’s printed on a thicker paper, with all pages arranged and glued inside the cover. This is the binding method that a lot of catalogs, magazines, or larger booklets use; it’s a great way to add a note of professionalism and quality design when your booklet has more than 40 pages.
Which method of binding is right for your design?
The question remains: Which of these two options is right for your design and marketing campaign? Think about the purpose of the booklet itself. Is this something you’re printing to include with product packaging, or to use as a time-sensitive mailer to alert customers of things like sales or new products? Or is it something that needs to last a little longer, contains more information or needs to appear highly professional?
In general, if a job serves a simpler purpose with a concise amount of content, then a saddle stitch booklet is probably the more cost-effective way to go. With saddle-stitch booklets, you can print as few as 8 pages and as many as 76 pages, so it’s the ideal choice for small to mid-size booklets.
If you’re designing a catalog, look book, quarterly report or new products guide that you know will contain many pages and plenty of content, you might consider opting for a well-designed perfect bound booklet. Perfect bound booklets start at 40 pages and can go over 100, so it’s the ideal choice for larger booklets and magazines.
Should you be printing something that mails out periodically, like a monthly or quarterly report or a professional newsletter to send to customers, clients or colleagues, it might be best to go with perfect bound booklets. Because the binding of the cover around the pages creates a spine on the back of the book, savvy designers can choose to label and date that spine, giving your booklets and even more professional, creative appeal. Issues can even be stacked on top of each other with your logo, the booklet name or date visible along the spines.
After the Decision is Made
Once you’ve decided what type of booklet you want to have printed, have all of your content organized and ideas brewing for effective design, give us a call at 800-227-7377 or shop our booklets and catalogs directly online. You’ll have your booklets, whether perfect bound or saddle stitched, before you know it and just as you imagined them to be.
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