Perfect Bound Books, Booklets & Brochure Printing

What is a Perfect Bound Booklet?

Perfect bound booklets are often known as glued because the pages are glued down to the cover at spine. Once the glue has dried, the remaining three sides are trimmed down to size, giving them ‘perfect’ edges. It’s one of the sturdiest booklet binding methods and is known for giving a professional, premium finish, meaning they’re often used for corporate reports, manuals and catalogues.

Paperback books are a common example of perfect bound booklets. Just like them, you’ll be able to choose a thicker paper stock as the cover with a soft-touch or glossy lamination.

A popular book binding glue is PUR, however we use one called EVA because it dries a lot faster, meaning we can produce them a lot more quickly.

To make sure there are enough pages to glue to the spine, the minimum number of printed pages we offer is 40pp.

How to Make a Perfect Bound Booklet

To make your own perfect bound brochure or booklet design, it’s important to think about the spine. No matter your experience or preferred design programme, we’ve created step-by-step instructions to make creating your own perfect bound book design from scratch, including how to set up your pages to include bleed.

Depending on your budget and what you want to use it for, we offer a huge range of paper types for perfect bound brochure printing. You can even add a matt or gloss coated paper to your cover page for a special touch. Matt lamination is a smooth, no-shine finish, whereas gloss gives your paper a high-shine look.

How Are Perfect Bound Booklets Made?

If you’re looking for high quality perfect bound booklet printing right here in the UK, you’ve come to the right place! We print all of our glued booklets using our high-speed ink jet printers (Truepress Jet 520HD) for the inside pages and either our iGen press or Heidelberg for book covers.

We then use a high strength, quick-drying glue called EVA glue to bind these pages and the cover together – also known as perfect binding. Depending on how many pages you supply, your book can have a designable spine. Because of their flat finish, this type of booklet is perfect for stacking as they easily fit together and look effective when set out this way.

Top 4 Most Common Uses for Perfect Bound Booklets

Perfect bound booklets are the best way to show customers you mean big business. If you’re not sure how to best use them for your marketing or what some more creative ideas to spice up your next came here, here are our favourite perfect bound booklet uses.

1) Product Catalogues

We love using perfect bound booklets as product catalogues! Because of their premium look and feel, they help give the products you’re selling an extra edge too. Go square with our 210mm perfect bound booklets or keep it classic with an A5 size.

2) Annual or Quarterly Magazines

If you don’t send out magazines frequently, you can afford to print high quality perfect bound ones. We know your customers will love to keep your branded magazine on their coffee table! A4 is a great size for your new swanky mag.

3) Employee Handbooks

Perfect bound booklets are sturdy and great for long-life usage. That’s why they’re great for employee handbooks or even brand guidelines. A small square perfect bound booklet is the ideal size for your new handbooks!

4) Prospectuses

Print your own prospectus for your college or university with instantprint and you’re sure to impress. With up to 120 pages to design, there’s plenty of room to shout about your courses and facilities. Go for an A5 perfect bound booklet for a student fair handout, or A4 if you’ve got a lot to say.

Our Top Perfect Bound Booklet Design Tips from Our Studio Team

Here are a few top tips and things to keep in mind when designing your own perfect bound booklets:

1) Setting Up Your Pages

Please set your perfect bound booklet artwork pages up as single pages in the same document, rather than spreads (two pages together). If you’re struggling with this, feel free to ask our Personal Artworker team how to do this by emailing pa@instantprint.co.uk.

2) Adding Bleed

We recommend adding 3mm bleed area as standard to your perfect bound booklet pages. Read our bleed guide for help with this and a short description of why you need to add bleed area when printing.

3) Keeping Text Safe

As well as a standard 3mm bleed area, we’d also recommend having a 6mm safety zone on the binding edge of your booklet pages and 3mm safety zone on the remaining three edges. This is because there will be a small area of your design that isn’t quite visible once printed due to how it’s glued. Make sure you keep important text away from the binding edge to avoid it being hidden in the fold line.

4) How to Upload Your Artwork

Because of how large perfect bound booklet files are, please use WeTransfer to send us your artwork.

To do this, place a blank order (order your booklets without any artwork) and we’ll send you an email with your web order number. Go to WeTransfer and send your artwork to us at artwork@instantprint.co.uk , using the web order number as your subject line. We’ll then triple check that your artwork is set up correctly before sending a proof for you to approve before we send it to print.

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