Perfect Binding Booklets: Your Guide to Custom Booklet Printing

Designers, creatives, and even nonprofits have the drive of inspiration in expressing their craft, along with the responsibility of representation — getting their work out into the world authentically while being accessible to their audience. Custom booklet printing does this beautifully. If you are an artist, creative, or have a custom booklet printing project under your care, read on! We’ll walk you through the ins and outs – and share a project spotlight so you can visualize what is possible with booklet printing.

In this last installment of our six-part series, we take you into the world of book, catalog, and magazine printing, presenting an intimate look at perfect binding booklet printing and how custom booklets can elevate your content presentation. With Bestype, you have the support of a comprehensive in-house team for custom booklet printing who understands the refinement of texture and the power of lavish, full-blown color to make a statement.

What Are Booklet Printing Options?

Knowing that a printed booklet is smaller than a book helps guide design. Booklets usually are bound using saddle stitching, but they can take advantage of other finishing methods and formats. Wire binding allows booklets to lie flat and use thicker stock, including different thicknesses of cardboard. Small paperbacks can be assembled using perfect binding and can still technically be considered a booklet. Perfect binding is often chosen for its elegance and dexterity, utilizing glue to adhere pages to binding, more closely mirroring a book.  

You can choose the texture and thickness of the paper, altering the length of the book while ensuring efficiency with the binding you choose. Booklets are often printed on double-sided pages and come in two standard sizes, 5.5″ x 8.5″ and 8.5″ x 11″ (measured when folded and closed). With all booklets, you need to think in page counts of 4, but otherwise, the sky is really the limit. 

Booklets Can Be Custom-Sized.

Orientation is a choice, whether portrait (it’s taller than it is wide) or landscape (it’s wider than it is tall). There is also adaptation to wide and short or long and tall in your custom formatting to create an impression before even opening the pages. How you present your design can pique curiosity before even opening the booklet. 

Creativity can also be customized on the cover with lamination, sport varnish, or foil stamping. We want you to think outside the known and into the unique, enjoying the freedom of expanding your design to meet the horizon of your imagination. Additional options include foldout pages and inserts for graphics or photographic landscapes — or a translucent rice paper inlay to set the booklet’s tone. From serving a wide array of clientele, Bestype has the experience, inventory, and technology to help you stand out, highlighting your vision and accomplishments. 

Why Choose Perfect Binding for Booklet Printing?

It creates a moment. In perfect binding booklet printing, the options are more expansive. If you are looking to create something, maybe a commemorative piece, whether it is for a collection or an annual report, perfect binding makes a formidable statement. Humans respond to experience, and a perfect-bound booklet presents more like a book, elegant and enduring with its closed, flat spine. The availability of paper texture and photographic color-layering can be unforgettable. 

Instead of telling you how special custom booklets can be, though, let us show you with a sample of work we did for African Parks.

Project Spotlight: African Parks Annual Report

African Parks is a nonprofit conservation organization that works with governments and local communities to rehabilitate and caretake protected areas. Recently they rehoused 250 elephants and reintroduced wild dogs to Malawi. They’ve set their sights on protecting 30 parks by 2030. Their mission is big, and their vision is bigger. 

We worked with African Parks to create their annual report, a print booklet, which is a representation of not only the rehabilitation they do but also the careful balancing they achieve between caretaking and maintaining solvency in working with so many organizations and expectations. We were proud to be a part of this project and even more proud of how it turned out.

Here’s what we did:

• The annual report was printed in A4 size measuring 8.3” wide and 11.7” high.
• We printed the 136 pages and cover in full color on our HP Indigo Press.
• The cover was printed on Mohawk 120# cover and laminated with a soft-touch matte film.
• We added a spot gloss treatment to enhance the cover photo and logos.
• Mohawk 100# text was used for the interior pages.
• We finished the books with perfect binding.

The result was a beautiful, textured booklet, with enhanced imagery directing the eye towards the light dancing on the water, translating the tonality of hope. This work and the work that you do deserves a presentation that is in alignment with your commitment.

Contact Bestype

Whether you are organizing an annual report, a gala event, or a compilation of your exhibits, a perfect-bound custom booklet will share your work through time. It will communicate to your investors the size of your determination, and broadcast to your audience the creativity you are ready to share. Custom booklet printing is taking the intangible and placing it in the hands of those who need it. Bestype has the in-house staff, printers, and expertise to create a booklet that will serve your business and your mission. Contact Bestype today for a quote on booklet printing services.

In our next article of the series, we explore the many uses of poster printing in NYC and how Bestype can help your message pop.