A working reference for UAE brands moving from a single folded sheet to bound catalogues. Real panel widths, paper weights, imposition notes and typography rules we use every week in our Ajman press.
Talk to a Print Advisor See Brochure OptionsMost brochure files we receive land on our prepress desk with the same three problems. Panels sized identically, so the tucked flap buckles at the crease. Cover images running to the trim edge without bleed, meaning slivers of white appear after guillotining. And body copy set in 8 point Helvetica across a full A4 measure, which reads like a legal notice rather than a brand story. This guide walks through the decisions that avoid those pitfalls, whether you are laying out a modest tri fold for a Sharjah cafe or a 96 page product catalogue for a Jebel Ali distributor.
We wrote it in the order a designer actually thinks. First the shape and fold, then the paper, then how pages sit on the press sheet, then how images and type behave across the gutter. Nothing here is theoretical. Every number comes from finishing a job on the shop floor.
Read cover to cover if you are new to print, or jump straight to the panel width chart if you already know your bi fold from your gate fold and just need dimensions that fold clean.
A brochure fold is not just a visual style, it is a reading pattern. The way a person opens the paper decides the order in which your story unfolds, so pick the fold that matches the pitch you want to make.
A single crease down the middle giving four panels. Feels premium because the spread opens like a book. Ideal for real estate showings, hotel welcome cards, spa menus and any product where the interior reveal matters. A4 folded to A5 is the workhorse size across the UAE.
Two parallel creases giving six panels, with the right panel tucking inside. The mailer standard. Great for service menus, clinic price lists and takeaway food guides. The one where panel width mathematics matters most, because a tucked panel too wide will jam against the fold.
Two parallel creases in alternating directions, opening flat like an accordion. Every panel reads left to right in sequence. Excellent for step by step processes, walking tours and phased offers. Feels graphic and modern, especially in a landscape format.
Two flaps that meet in the middle and open outward like shutters, revealing a wide interior spread. The most theatrical fold available. We use it for property launches, jewellery lookbooks and luxury automotive brochures where the reveal is the whole point. Requires slightly shorter flap widths so they close flush.
Three or more parallel creases where each panel folds inward and rolls up on itself. Delivers a compact object with a lot of surface area. Popular for pharmaceutical inserts, wine tasting notes and travel packages with many sub sections. Each successive inner panel must be a couple of millimetres narrower than the one wrapping it.
Folded in half, then folded in half again in the same direction, producing eight panels from a single sheet. Feels dense and considered, well suited to conference programmes, event schedules and layered technical brochures where you want a lot of content in a pocketable format.
Here is where most first time brochure designers get caught out. If your tri fold uses six equal panels of 99 mm on an A4 sheet, the tucked panel will collide with the spine crease and the whole piece refuses to sit flat. The physics is simple. The panel doing the tucking has to be shorter, because it sits inside the space defined by the other two panels minus the paper thickness.
Below is a chart we hand to every new client. The numbers are what we cut and score on our folders, tested across 130 gsm silk through to 350 gsm uncoated cover stock. Adjust the inner panel by another 0.5 mm if you are using very thick paper above 200 gsm.
| Format | Flat Size | Fold Style | Outer / Cover Panel | Middle Panel | Inner (Tucked) Panel |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A4 Tri Fold | 297 x 210 mm | Letter Fold | 100 mm | 100 mm | 97 mm |
| A4 Z Fold | 297 x 210 mm | Concertina | 99 mm | 99 mm | 99 mm |
| DL Tri Fold | 297 x 210 mm folded to 99 x 210 | Letter | 100 mm | 100 mm | 97 mm |
| A3 Roll Fold | 420 x 297 mm | 4 Panel Roll | 106 mm | 106 mm / 104 mm | 102 mm |
| A4 Gate Fold | 297 x 210 mm | Gate | 149 mm centre | — | 74 mm each flap |
| A5 Bi Fold | 210 x 148 mm folded to 105 x 148 | Half | 105 mm | — | 105 mm |
| A4 Double Parallel | 297 x 210 mm | 8 Panel | 75 mm | 74 mm | 73 mm |
Paper is the silent half of any brochure. Two identical designs printed on different stock read as different documents. Here is how the weights break down for the UAE market, where humidity and long transport routes both play a role.
The territory of magazine interiors, catalogue guts and event programmes. A 130 gsm silk sits nicely for full colour photography without going see through. Below 90 gsm you start to see show through from the next page, which is fine for newsprint but rarely acceptable for a corporate piece.
For single sheet folded brochures pick 170 to 250 gsm. Anything lighter feels flimsy in the hand, anything heavier fights the fold. For perfect bound covers we push to 300 or 350 gsm, usually with a soft touch or matt laminate that resists the fingerprints Dubai air conditioning tends to invite.
Uncoated stocks flatter typography and give the reader that natural, tactile pause a luxury brand often wants. Silk is the balanced choice, holding colour saturation without the mirror glare of gloss. Gloss earns its place on food catalogues and product sheets where wet, saturated imagery has to sing. For anything a reader will hold under harsh mall lighting or a hotel lobby chandelier, silk is almost always safer than gloss.
170 gsm silk interior, 300 gsm silk cover with soft touch laminate and spot UV on the logo. Reads considered without shouting.
350 gsm uncoated cover, wipeable matte laminate, 170 gsm silk pages. Survives table service and still photographs well.
250 gsm silk single sheet bi fold, aqueous coated to resist water damage in the guest room bathroom shelf.
Gate fold in 300 gsm silk with foil accents on the cover, tissue interleaving between hero renders on 150 gsm uncoated.
Perfect bound, 300 gsm silk cover, 130 gsm silk interior, PUR glue for durability in bag or briefcase transit.
Saddle stitched 32 pages, 250 gsm cover, 150 gsm silk interior, deckled front edge for a tactile signal of quality.
A brochure that outgrows a single sheet becomes a booklet, and a booklet has to be bound. The two binding methods that account for the vast majority of UAE brochure work are saddle stitch and perfect binding, and they meet at roughly the 48 page mark.
Saddle stitching means folding the sheets in half and stapling through the spine. The maximum you can push before the pages start to bulge and the outer trim goes uneven is around 64 pages on 130 gsm stock, or 48 pages on 170 gsm. Below that threshold saddle stitch is faster, cheaper and lays completely flat when opened, which is a genuine reading benefit.
Perfect binding uses a spine of glue where the folded sections meet a wraparound cover. It gives you a printable spine, a squared off look and pages that can run into the hundreds. The compromise is that opening near the spine can crack the glue over time, and images crossing the gutter get partially swallowed. Perfect bound brochures need a slightly wider inner margin to survive that reality.
PUR glue, which we run as standard on longer runs, is the modern answer. It flexes rather than snaps, so a heavy catalogue opens more willingly and stays intact after months of handling.
This is the part designers often skip and printers always fix at prepress. Imposition is the arrangement of your pages on the press sheet so that after printing, folding and trimming they end up in the correct reading order. For a saddle stitched 16 page A5 brochure, page 1 sits beside page 16 on the sheet, page 2 next to page 15, and so on. The software handles the maths, but the design has to respect it.
Design in reader spreads, not printer spreads. That means page 4 and page 5 sitting side by side in your InDesign or Affinity file, exactly as the reader will see them. Do not try to impose the file yourself unless your printer specifically asks. Send us reader spreads or single pages in a print ready PDF and our workflow handles imposition automatically, including any creep compensation for thicker booklets where the inner pages need trimming a fraction narrower.
A hero image running across a two page spread has to negotiate the fold or the spine. On saddle stitch this is forgiving because the book opens flat. On perfect bound, expect around 3 to 5 mm of your image to be lost into the gutter on each side. Design accordingly. Do not centre a face on the spine. Do not run critical typography across the gutter of a perfect bound book. Push the composition so that the interesting content sits comfortably away from where the pages meet.
Bleed is the extension of your background beyond the trim edge, usually 3 mm, occasionally 5 mm for very large formats. The guillotine has a tolerance of a fraction of a millimetre. Without bleed you get thin white slivers along the edges of any full colour panel. Every image or colour block that meets the trim must extend past it. Every important detail must sit inside the safe zone. Those two habits alone prevent about half of the reprints we see across the industry.
A brochure is not a poster. Your reader will sit with it for two or three minutes, sometimes ten if you have earned their attention. Body type has to work at length. Set it 9 to 11 point on a 13 to 15 point leading depending on the typeface. Line length between 55 and 75 characters, which on A5 usually means a two column grid rather than a full page measure. Wider than 75 characters and the eye loses the return sweep.
Choose a serif or a humanist sans for body copy. Serifs like Freight Text, Sabon or Source Serif read fluidly at small sizes and feel considered. Humanist sans faces like Source Sans, Inter or Fira Sans have the open apertures that let letters breathe on coated stock. Pair with a display face for headlines that carries some personality, but hold restraint on the body.
For bilingual English and Arabic brochures, which are increasingly common across the Emirates, pick type families that ship both scripts from the same foundry. Adobe Arabic, Neue Haas Grotesk Arabic, Frutiger Arabic and IBM Plex Sans Arabic all pair sensibly with their Latin siblings. The x heights and stroke weights match, so a bilingual paragraph does not feel like two different documents stapled together.
A brochure spread with everything shouting reads as nothing. Establish a three level hierarchy at most. A single dominant element per spread, a supporting layer of subheads or captions, and body copy that fills in the detail. Use scale, weight and colour sparingly and consistently. If your section headers are 24 point in brand red on page 3, they should be exactly that on page 11.
Whitespace is not empty space. It is what lets the eye rest and the important content register. Corporate profiles from Dubai finance clients often arrive with copy blocks jammed edge to edge, and the first thing our design team does is add margin. Ten millimetres of extra breathing room on each side of a headline can raise perceived quality more than any luxury laminate.
Front cover, an opening statement page, chairman or founder note, our story, what we do, capabilities or divisions, project or client showcase, values and culture, awards or credentials, contact spread. Twelve to twenty four pages typically covers this comfortably. Photography does most of the work. Text is used to frame and credential, not to over explain.
Cover, contents, brand intro, category dividers, product spreads with specifications, ordering information, terms of trade, back cover with contact detail. Consistent product page templates matter more than creative variety here. A buyer scanning a catalogue wants to find the same information in the same location on every product page.
Cover with event name and date, welcome message, agenda at a glance, session detail spreads, speaker biographies, venue map, sponsor recognition, notes pages, back cover with hashtag and social handles. Z fold or roll fold single sheet works well up to about eight sections. Beyond that, move to a saddle stitched booklet.
Location context, lifestyle spread, architect vision, floor plans, unit types, amenities, developer credentials, payment plan, contact and disclaimer. Renders and photography carry the emotional weight. Floor plans should be printed at large enough scale to read the room labels without a magnifying glass, which usually means A3 folded to A4.
Brochures printed in the UAE run predominantly on offset presses for volumes over 1000 units and digital presses below that. Both convert to CMYK, so build your files in CMYK from the start rather than trusting the printer to make good colour decisions from an RGB file. If your brand relies on specific Pantone spot colours for logo work, flag them clearly in the file. On premium jobs we can print a fifth colour as a Pantone match, which gives you a truer brand red or teal than CMYK approximation ever will.
Coatings finish the piece. Matte laminate hides fingerprints and softens the look. Gloss laminate deepens colours and adds durability. Soft touch laminate feels velvety in the hand and elevates any perceived value. Spot UV over a matte lamination creates a subtle raised gloss on selected elements, most often the logo or a hero product silhouette. Foil stamping in gold, silver, copper or rose gold reads as luxury and holds its shine for years.
A tidy handoff saves hours. Export a print ready PDF using the PDF X 4 preset. Embed all fonts. Flatten transparency to avoid rendering surprises. Include 3 mm bleed and crop marks. Confirm colour mode is CMYK, black text is 100 percent K rather than a rich black mix, and images are at 300 dpi at final print size. Send a low resolution reference PDF alongside so we can compare pages after imposition and flag anything unexpected before we plate.
Package your linked images if we might need to make late corrections. Note any Pantone spot colours in the email. Confirm the flat size, folded size, page count and binding method in writing. Ninety percent of production delays come from ambiguity at file handoff, not from actual production time on press.
Our Ajman press runs digital and offset side by side, so a 50 piece boutique run and a 5000 piece corporate rollout both get quoted the same day. Share your artwork or brief and we will come back with a spec, sample paper swatches and honest advice on where to spend and where to save.
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