Trifold Brochure

8.5 x 11 in CMYK 1.29:1 portrait

An 8.5 by 11 in trifold brochure canvas. Folds into three panels at roughly 3.66 in each for a standard Letter-folded marketing piece.

about the size of a sheet of office paper

About this size

A trifold brochure is six design surfaces on one sheet of paper. Outside cover, outside flap, outside back, inside left, inside centre, inside right. Each surface has a different reader context: the cover is what gets picked up, the inside-left is what the reader sees when the brochure opens, the back is what gets read when the brochure is set down.

The design problem is treating each panel as the right thing for its context, not as a generic block of layout space. Brochures that ignore the fold logic feel like flyers that happen to be folded.

Brochures
Marketing layouts
Folded handouts

Pro tips

1 Plan content panel by panel. The cover, inside flow, and back each need their own attention; the brochure is not a single layout.
2 Put the hero message on the inside-left panel. That is the first surface the reader sees on opening, and it gets the strongest attention.
3 Folds shift by 1/16 in or so on press. Critical content placed right at a fold can land on the wrong side of the crease.

Export notes

Export as a two-page CMYK PDF (outside spread, inside spread) at 300 DPI with 0.125 in bleed and crop marks turned on. Add fold-line guides on a non-printing layer so the printer can verify scoring placement; some commercial presses score the paper before folding, and an off-spec fold guide produces visibly misaligned panels.