Set up an A5 booklet that folds out to A3 poster

There are lots of ideas for laying out a job like this ... take the one I'm offering as one of them.

Ultimately, you're going to want to lay out your job in a two-page, A3 document with one page being your inside poster, and the other being a composite of all the booklet spreads as you fold out from your half-an-A5 front cover. But it's really daunting to start designing your brochure with the layout for your end product. So don't do that. I think you may find it easier not to think of the outside panels of your job so much as being a booklet, but designing it as a five-panel brochure.

A good brochure tells a story. The last panel — the end of your story — will be your inside A3 poster. I'm sure you know what you want there, and how you the want story to end, so I won't address that until we get there. There's no need for us to spoil the end of the story.

I think perhaps the first thing driving you crazy is that you're thinking of cutting your A5 pages in half to create spreads and then somehow building them in pieces, instead of letting InDesign do it for you and make the job easy on yourself. Set up an 8-page half-an-A5 page-sized document, 105mm wide by 148mm tall, with no facing pages, like the example illustrated below in the new document panel.

InDesign lets you stick pages together to create multi-page panels, so you can design brochure panels the way you'd see them in your finished brochure. By default, we're going to create a document with 8 individual pages, stacked 1-up in the Pages panel, as shown in the illustration below:

Page 1 is going to be the hook of your story — the Front Cover of your brochure that draws people in. It's probably the most important part of the story, even though it's the smallest, because if the Front Cover isn't compelling enough for people to pick up your brochure and open it, nobody's going to see what you've got to say.

Page 2 is going to be the Back Cover. Not to give it short shrift, but the Back Cover is often an afterthought, containing little more than maybe a logo and contact information ... unless you plan to mail the brochure. Then it becomes almost as important as the Front Cover, because the first thing your reader is going to see is the last thing the postal worker saw checking the address and putting it in the box.

Pages 3 and 4 will be your (first) Gatefold Panel. Content here needs to reward your reader from opening the front cover, and compel the reader to go to ...

Pages 5-8, which will be your (second) Gatefold Panel. This further reinforces your reader's desire for more information and leads to the big payoff, which is ...

Your A3 poster inside the brochure!

Now that we've laid out the story, let's lay out the pages!

Go to the flyaway menu on your Pages panel and turn off both the Allow Document Pages to Shuffle and Allow Selected Spread to Shuffle options as shown at lower left by selecting first one, then the other, in the menu. You'll know you've done that when the check marks to the left of those commands disappear. Then, take your cursor and place the page 4 icon on top of the page 3 to create your (first) gatefold panel of two pages and place your pages 6 through 8 on the icon for page 5 to create the four-page (second) gatefold panel, as shown below right.

Your pages panel — and your gatefold page spreads — should look like the example below:

Design your inside panels one by one. Don't worry about the inside page dividing lines on the gatefold panels. If you want, you can design right over them as you tell your story the way you want to tell it. This will be a lot easier than trying to fill little spaces inside a great big sheet with the story you want to tell.

Now, to assemble the final job, create a second InDesign document consisting of two A3 pages. One page will consist of your A3 poster you want in the middle of your brochure. the other will be subdivided into 8; 2 rows of 4 columns copied from your first InDesign document and pasted according to the legend below:

So that's the whole story for putting together the job you want to do, step by step, as easily as I can make it. I think if you follow this step by step, you'll get the results you're looking for.

If you're looking for a simple example, here's a foldover business card sort of similar to your project that I use to teach these principles in my Essential InDesign Basics class:

https://www.behance.net/gallery/17497927/35-x-7-Business-Card-Flyer

Hope this helps. Good luck,

Randy

I'd expect you'd set up an a3 document. Make a folding model to figure out how to lay out the other pages. This is advanced imposition.

You could start off by getting a blank sheet of A3 paper, folding it to A5 and then numbering the pages to suit your purposes. You may want to have the images on the A3 poster bleeding, in which case you'll need an SRA3 sheet.

You can set up a document for each side A3 (plus bleed), and have ruler guides for the A5 "pages".