Layout Department

Cover

Cover layouts! Right now you can use Layout Department to make booklet-type covers, with a center fold and no spine. (More to come, like perfect bound covers with a spine, and french fold covers – this is an area of future development.) The main reason that it’s good to lay out covers separately from the book/zine/booklet interior pages is because covers are typically printed on different paper (often thicker stock, and/or a different color). And sometimes they’re printed with different inks (full color versus black and white, or using more ink colors for risograph/offset). So you might want to deal with those files in a different way, especially if you’re doing color separation with something like Spectrolite. Also, you’re doing the printing yourself or with a more manual method (such as with risograph) you might make your designs with a bigger bleed for covers than you have for the book interior. Finally, you might be printing your covers on a different sheet size than your book interiors.

How to make a cover layout

Select Cover in the Format dropdown in the top of the left sidebar. Then, here’s the basic process:

  1. Select your paper size, page size, number of pages per sheet-side (n-up), etc.
  2. If you have printing on the inside of the cover, check the box for Inner cover. (Available with the paid license.)
  3. You can upload multiple files: a front cover and back cover as separate PDFs, or a “spread” with the front and back in one file. You can also upload the inside cover content as separate pages for inner front, inner back, or as a spread.
  4. A file list will appear. Select what each file is: a front, back, or a spread. You can also add more PDFs here if needed.
  5. You can use the right arrow (>) to minimize the file list, and you can click on the book icon near the file name at the bottom right to re-open it.
  6. Export your cover files when you’re done.

Printing on the inner cover

It can be fun to have a something printed on the inside of the cover, on the other side of the sheet of paper: perhaps a marbled or abstract design, a table of contents, an epigraph or colophon, or information about the book or publisher. Or more content. Either way, sometimes you want to have printing on the inside cover! To make a silly example, here’s a 2 page PDF with the front/back cover spread as the first page, and the inner cover printing spread as the second page. Check the box for “inner cover” (paid license feature) and add your PDF(s) with content. On the display overlay and page numbering Printer’s Marks, you’ll see IF and IB as abbreviations for “Inner Front” and “Inner Back”.

How to prepare your PDFs for cover layouts

Layout Department is pretty flexible with what you can use for your PDFs for covers. Upload your PDF(s) and then use the file list to tell it which pages/spreads to use where.

Spreads: Make your front and back cover together as a single spread, as one PDF with the front and back cover as one PDF page, including bleed if you would like. Layout Department will split the spread vertically or horizontally, depending on if you have the binding set to the side or top.

Individual Pages (the front and back as separate pages).

If you have printing on the inner cover, you can add:

We recommend choosing one of the above methods to organize your file(s) and keeping your covers separately from your interior pages, if you’re using the Cover layout. If you put in a PDF with more than 2 pages (or 4 pages, if you have inner covers), Layout Department isn’t expecting that many pages… But it will try to do it’s best: in this case, it shows the first and last pages of the PDF (or the first two and last two pages, if you have inner covers) for you to pick from.

More than one cover per sheet of paper

If you’re arranging more than one cover per sheet of paper, take care when printing to only print the number you need. (It’s an easy mistake to make!) For example, if you’ve got two covers per sheet of paper (4-up printing), and you’re making 100 books, only print 50 copies, because when you cut the sheets in half that will give you the 100 covers you need. You’ll see a little yellow highlight to remind you when you get multiple covers for every sheet of paper you print. You can use the calculator in the bottom right to do math for how many sheets of paper to print, to get the desired number of covers. Depending on your selection for the number of pages per sheet side, you might have 2, 3, 4, or 5 covers printed on a sheet of paper.

For example, with 8 pages per sheet side (8-up) you’ll get 4 covers per sheet. Your options will depend on what Printer Type you’re working with, and how many covers can print on each side of the page, and your other selections.

Cover Layouts with a single stencil / single plate

If you’re working with a Stencil or Plate-based Printer like risograph, offset, letterpress for some layouts you can have the option to save time and money by making only one stencil/plate, and printing the same design on both sides of the sheet of paper. (This is a similar concept to Special Repeated Sheet for interior content, and is also a paid license feature.)

Single stencil/plate is currently available for certain 4- or 8-page per sheet-side (4-up or 8-up) layouts, when you’re using the Assembly type Print then collate. Here’s how it works: when you’re working with a single stencil/plate cover layout, you will print the stencil on the front side. Then, you wait until the ink has dried (enough to feed through the printer a second time without smudging or jamming). Then you flip the whole paper stack over (and sometimes also rotate the stack, so the opposite side is the lead edge going into the printer – it depends on the layout) and print the same stencil/plate on the back side. Hovering over the yellow highlights in the app will give you tooltips with more information.

(Remember, you are getting multiple covers for each sheet you print – the number of covers per sheet depends on your settings. Take care not to print too many copies on accident. And printers/presses can be different: as with all layouts, you want to make a dummy or test to double check that this will work with your setup.)

Depending on your layout, you might also see an option for single stencil/plate where you can choose between Cuts and Group for your arrangement.

Changing the grid spacing and position for covers

If your covers have extra space between their trim size and the max page size allowed by a layout you’ve selected, you can also change the Grid Spacing and Grid Position for covers. You might want to have tight, squished, or outer Grid Spacing to make your cutting easier or fit more content on the page while still leaving room for Printer’s Marks like trim and bleed marks.

Or you might want to change the Grid Position, moving the printed away from lead edge when printing with riso, offset, letterpress or other printing method where it helps to have less ink on the edge of the paper that feeds into the printer/press first. You might also want to move the covers towards the edge of paper to use the remaining paper for something else (bookmarks, other prints, scrap paper notepads with the offcuts).

If you’re using a single stencil/plate layout, sometimes you can’t change the grid position at all, or you can only change the grid position towards or away from the lead edge, but not side to side, because of how you flip the paper.