Fold a sheet eight times and you control what a reader meets first, what stays hidden and what arrives as a surprise. Zhicheng, a Royal College of Art student, used exactly that power to tell the story of Reclaim A Playground, a concertina folded leaflet backing a petition to protect outdoor space around Trellick Tower in North Kensington. Closed, it is a slim DL panel of chunky pixel lettering. Pulled open, it stretches to 891mm of essays, photographs and maps, while on the reverse a scatter of black shapes jumps into a jagged relief as the panels zigzag.
We printed it for his final project, and it is packed with moves other designers can lift. These are the five we would steal first.
Make the closed panel a poster in miniature
Most people meet a leaflet folded, so Zhicheng gave the front panel one job: stop them. RECLAIM A PLAYGROUND is set in a custom pixel grid typeface, every letter built from tiny squares. Those squares look uncannily like rows of windows on a tower block, and the whole alphabet reappears as a specimen on one of the inside panels, so the lettering becomes part of the argument.
A title only works if it lands on top when the leaflet closes. Ahead of printing, we mapped the fold direction against his artwork, marking which panel becomes the front and which closes the back. If your own leaflet has a hero panel, tell your printer which one it is.
Design the reverse as a second picture
Turn the sheet over and the mood flips. Bold black trapezoids march across all nine panels. Laid flat they look abstract, almost random. Stand the leaflet up in its zigzag and the shapes meet across the creases, forming a three dimensional relief that echoes the hard concrete angles of the tower itself.
That trick only works because both faces were planned as one object. When you design a long fold, sketch the reverse with the creases drawn in, then fold a paper mock up before you finalise anything.
Pick a paper that folds without a fight
Eight folds on one sheet will expose a heavy or coated stock very quickly. Zhicheng came to us through our quote form with his sizes already worked out, asked for advice on paper weight and left the quality call to us on the form. We suggested treating 115gsm as the ceiling: light enough for the panels to stack flat when closed, with enough body to stand up on a table. We also steered him away from coatings and laminates that could compromise the folds. He chose a natural white uncoated sheet, and every fold was machine creased before folding, so each panel turns on a clean, sharp edge.
The rule scales. The more panels you have, the lighter the stock should be. Our pages on concertina and Z fold leaflets cover the options.
Run the argument panel by panel
Unfolded, the inside is built like a case file. The sequence goes:
- oversized TRELLICK TOWER lettering beside a dense grid of high contrast estate photographs;
- essays on reclaiming the playground, on Brutalism and urbanisation, and on the playground areas themselves;
- a silhouette map of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea with compass lines, pinning the story to place;
- a final panel that closes on a plain request: please sign our petition.
The layout mixes the symmetry of architectural plans with the asymmetry of candid street photography, and the grainy images give it a raw, unfiltered edge. Because the reader physically unrolls it, more like opening a city map than turning a page, the ask on the last panel lands as the natural end of a walk. Put your call to action where the unfolding stops.
Let one ink carry a campaign
Black only, on both sides, keeps the message urgent and the cost down. On uncoated paper the solids take on a matt, poster like weight that suits a piece with roots in protest print, while halftone greys and that digital looking lettering pull it into the present. Ernő Goldfinger’s Grade II* listed Brutalist tower gets a leaflet with the same blunt confidence.
The flat sheet measures 210 x 891mm and closes to a 99 x 210mm DL panel, a size made for envelopes and display racks. Before you fix panel widths for your own fold, check where DL sits among the common sheet and envelope formats, and read our artwork preparation notes so crease positions and bleed line up. We confirmed the flat and folded dimensions with Zhicheng at the start, so there was never any doubt about how 891mm would become nine panels.
Final year and MA students can bring a fold like this to our printing for final major projects. Tell us what the fold has to do, and we will talk you through stock and creasing before anything is printed.
PaperbacksA5, 44 pages, perfect bound£246for 100
Product cataloguesA5, 28 pages, stapled£166for 100
