Creating a setup for an A5 flyer is easy in Adobe Indesign. This is one of the may topics we cover in all our Indesign training classes.
Firstly, the initial setup is created via the File drop-down menu. Here we choose New and Document. Books, Libraries and Folios we cover in later blog posts. Before we start designing we should check first the units of measurement. If these are not millimeters we should cancel the dialog box in order to change the program’s preferences with no documents open.
Next go to the Edit menu and select Preferences. In the Macintosh version of the program, it’s Indesign and Preferences. Select the Units & Increments section to change the Ruler Units of Horizontal and Vertical to mm. This should now be the default setting for Indesign on this computer.
No we return to the File, New, Document dialog box. Ignore the Presets section for the moment. For Facing Pages and Primary Text Frame simply leave these at the default settings. For Page size choose A5 from the drop-down list. And Margins for a small publication like this you only need abround 5mm.
Now click the More Options button to see the Bleed and Slug section. Bleed is usually required if you’re sending the document to a commercial printer and the publication has images or colour bars that you want to print to the edge of the paper. In this case you need to set up a bleed guide to which you’ll scale the images or colour bars. The reason for this is that flyers will be tiled and printed on larger sheets (8-up or 16-up), then trimmed down to the flyer’s size. However, the high-speed trimmers used in the process are not always 100% accurate, so you need to provide a 2-5mm margin of error, known as bleed.
Note that you can’t do this with in-house printing though – you will always get a white border, unless you print on large sheets and trim them manually. The Slug section you can ignore since it’s only used by newspapers. Tick Preview on the bottom left to see the result on the screen before you hit OK to close the dialog box. If you need to change any of these settings later on simply go to File and choose Document Setup, or Layout and Margins & Columns.
More tips and techniques can be found at Adobe.com. There are many tutorials and forums for designers to discuss topics and the latest Indesign features. See also many examples of our own clients’ work on our Facebook page.
Other related Indesign Blog Posts:

• Indesign images and text
  
• Indesign workflow
• Indesign templates
• Indesign page numbers
• Indesign add hyperlink