How to Design a Square Cross-Folded Brochure Layout

What You’ll Be Creating

A square cross-folded brochure will get your business noticed. In this tutorial, I will teach you how to make a cross-folded brochure layout design in Adobe InDesign. In the end, you’ll design a real estate square brochure design template.

Designing a cross-folded brochure can be time-consuming, but it doesn’t have to be. You can grab this amazing Real Estate Square Folded Cross Brochure on Envato Elements. It has an extensive collection of premium brochure design templates ready for you to customize.

What You’ll Learn in This Square Cross-Folded Brochure Tutorial

How to set up diecuts and guides in InDesign
How to format and place photos in InDesign
How to lay out and design a 4-fold brochure

What You’ll Need to Create a Cross-Folded Square Brochure Layout

1. How to Set Up Diecuts and Guides in InDesign for Brochure Designing

Step 1

Open InDesign and create a new document (File > New). Make the Width and Height of your 4-fold brochure 17.1875 in, with 2 Pages, 0 in Margins, and 0.125 in Bleed on all sides.

Step 2

In the Layers panel, rename ‘Layer 1‘ to ‘Artwork‘. Create a new layer and name it ‘Diecut‘. Uncheck the Print Layer box. Create another layer and name it ‘Guides‘ and uncheck the Print Layer box.

Step 3

On the Diecut layer, create a 5.75 in square using the Rectangle Tool (M). Change the Fill to None and the Stroke to the pink color swatch in the Swatches panel. Change the Stroke Weight to 0.5 pt. Make sure Smart Guides are turned on by going to View > Grids & Guides > Smart Guides. Place the square in the middle of the document. The pink guide line will be where the brochure will fold.

Step 4

Copy (Command-C) and paste (Command-V) this square, but change the stroke to green in the Swatches panel. This guide shows where our document will be cut. Change the size of this square to 5.8508 in Width and 5.75 in Height. Move it to the right of the first square. This will be our cover. The cover should extend all the way to the bleed area.

Step 5

Copy (Command-C) and paste (Command-V) the square again. The next three squares will be smaller than the first two squares because they have to fit on top of one another once folded. Place this square at the top of our document. Change the Width to 5.6 in and the Height to 5.8508 in.

Step 6

Create two more squares for the left and bottom panels. Add labels to your document like the image below. This will help you remember how your document folds and which panels are paired with one another.

Step 7

Copy (Command-C) and Paste in Place (Edit > Paste in Place) the pink diecut square and the green fold squares to the second page of our square cross-fold brochure. Next, go to Object > Transform > Flip Horizontal so that the inside of our cover is now on the left side. Label the second page as we did the first.

Step 8

Select the Guides layer in the Layers panel. Create four blue squares with an Opacity of 20%. This will show us how far we need to extend the bleed area. Use these sizes for the squares:

Cover: 5.8508 in Width, 6 in Height
A1: 5.8508 in Width, 5.85 in Height
B1: 5.85 in Width, 5.8508 in Height
C1: 5.85 in Width, 5.8508 in Height

Step 9

Create four more squares and Fill them with yellow with an Opacity of 20%. We will use this yellow square to mark our safe margins. We will keep all the important information within this guide so it doesn’t get cut off. Use these dimensions:

Cover: 5.2258 in Width x 5.25 in Height
A1: 5.2188 in Width x 5.1 in Height
B1: 5.1 in Width x 5.2188 in Height
C1: 5.1 in Width x 5.2188 in Height

Step 10

Next, Copy (Command-C) and Paste in Place (Edit > Paste in Place) the yellow and blue guides on the second page. Next, go to Object > Transform > Flip Horizontal as we did in the previous step so that your second page looks like the image below.