How to Make a Trifold Brochure With AI (Panel by Panel)

Take a sheet of paper, fold it in three, and put it face-up on a table. Look at what's showing. That's roughly one-sixth of everything you designed, and it's the only part most people will ever read.

That's the whole problem with a trifold brochure, and it's why so many of them fail in a way a flyer never does. A flyer is one surface — you control the reading order because there's only one. A trifold has six panels, two sides, and a physical sequence the fold imposes on your reader whether you planned for it or not. Design it as "three columns of text, twice" and you get something that technically prints and completely fails to be read.

So before we get to fonts or colors: here's the panel map, a worked example, and how to build the thing in Ridvay Studio in about twenty minutes.

A trifold brochure has six panels and one first impression

Standard trifold, US Letter: an 11 × 8.5 inch sheet in landscape, printed both sides, folded twice into three panels of roughly 3.67 inches each. (A4 works out the same way — 297 × 210 mm, panels of 99 mm.) At 300 DPI that's a 3300 × 2550 px canvas per side.

Six panels. But they are absolutely not six equal opportunities:

• Outside sheet, left to right: the tuck-in flap, the back cover, the front cover.
• Inside sheet, left to right: three panels that the reader sees all at once, as a single spread.

The counterintuitive bit is that the front cover sits on the right of the outside sheet, and the panel that lands on the far left is the flap that tucks inside. When you build the file, you are laying out panels in physical order, not reading order.

Reading order is a different sequence entirely: front cover, then the flap that's revealed when they open it, then the inside spread all at once, then the back cover — which, sitting face-up in a rack, gets read before everything else about as often as after.

Every content decision follows from that list. The front cover gets one job. The flap gets whatever removes the reason not to continue. The spread gets the actual argument. The back cover gets the things a person needs when they've already decided.

The panel map, using a real example

Say it's a physiotherapy clinic — Northside Physio — printing brochures to leave at local GP surgeries. Here's the map I'd give them.

Panel 3 (front cover). Name, one promise, one image. That's it. "Northside Physio" and "Back to normal, sooner." Not a list of services. Not the address. A brochure sitting in a rack competes with eight others, and the only question on the cover is is this about me? Every extra line makes that question harder to answer.

Panel 1 (the flap). This is the panel nobody plans, and it's the most valuable one after the cover, because it's what the reader sees at the exact moment they've decided to give you ten more seconds. Put the objection-killer here. For a clinic: "Your first visit" — four numbered steps, thirty words total, ending with "no referral needed." That's the thing standing between "maybe" and "book."

Panels 4–6 (the inside spread). The pitch. Treat these three as one layout, not three columns: what we treat / how it works / what it costs and how to book. You can run a single headline band across the top of the spread — just not across a fold at text size (more on that below).

Panel 2 (the back cover). Address, phone, hours, a map thumbnail, a QR code to the booking page. Boring, functional, and the panel most likely to be face-up in a rack — so it needs the clinic name on it too. If you're putting a QR code here, make it one people can actually scan — size it at least 2 cm square and don't bury it in the corner bleed.

Notice what didn't get a panel: the founder's story, the equipment list, the mission statement. A trifold that tries to carry all six panels' worth of content ends up at 7pt type, and 7pt type is a decision to not be read.

Fold-safe margins, and the panel that's 3 mm narrower

Two print details that cause most of the reprints.

Keep text a quarter inch off every fold. A fold line is not a design element you can straddle. Text crossing it gets creased through the middle; a logo crossing it gets a white crack down the face. Give yourself a 0.25 inch gutter on both sides of each fold, plus the usual 0.25 inch from the trim edge and 0.125 inch of bleed on anything that runs off the page. Background color can cross a fold happily. Words and faces cannot.

Make the tuck-in flap narrower. This is the one that surprises people. On a roll fold, the flap folds inward first and the other panels close over it — so if all three panels are exactly 3.667 inches, the flap has nowhere to go and the brochure bulges or buckles at the spine. Trim about an eighth of an inch off it and give that width back to another panel. Panels of 3.60 / 3.70 / 3.70 inches still add to exactly 11. At 300 DPI: 1080 / 1110 / 1110 px.

If your printer supplies a template, use theirs and skip the arithmetic. If they don't, those numbers are safe.

Building the trifold brochure in Ridvay Studio

Start with the outside sheet, because it's the one with the cover on it. Open Studio and type the panel map straight into the prompt — describing panels by position is what makes this work:

Trifold brochure outside sheet, 11x8.5 inches landscape, three equal panels. Right panel is the front cover: Northside Physio, tagline "Back to normal, sooner," over a photo of a physiotherapist working with a patient. Middle panel is the back cover: address, phone, opening hours and a QR code. Left panel is the tuck-in flap: heading "Your first visit" with four short numbered steps. Deep navy and white, one sans-serif family, keep all text well clear of the two fold lines.

What comes back isn't a flat picture you'd have to re-prompt to change. It's an editable design — the headline, each step, the panel dividers, the photo, the QR code all sit on the canvas as separate layers you click and change. Which matters here more than usual, because a brochure is nearly all fine adjustment.

Four edits I'd make immediately, each one tied to something above:

1. Push the cover headline up and cut a line. Click the tagline, drag the size until it reads at arm's length, and delete anything that isn't the name or the promise. The cover has one job.
2. Pull text off the folds. Select each panel's text block and nudge it inward until there's a clear quarter-inch band down both sides of every fold. Easiest way to see it: drop two thin light rectangles at the fold positions as temporary guides, align to them, then delete the guides before you export.
3. Resize the flap panel. Select the leftmost panel's background rectangle, set its width to 3.60 in (1080 px at 300 DPI), and shift the other two across. Two minutes now, no buckled fold later.
4. Apply your brand kit. If you've set one up, one click swaps the placeholder navy for your actual navy and the generic sans for your actual type — across all six panels, so the two sheets can't drift apart.

Then run the inside sheet as a second page in the same design, so both sides share the palette and type:

Trifold brochure inside spread, 11x8.5 inches landscape, three panels reading left to right as one layout: What we treat, How it works in three steps, and Pricing with a book-now call to action. Deep navy and white, one sans-serif family, generous margins at the folds.

Export both at 300 DPI and send them to the printer as two files, clearly labeled outside and inside. Before you order 500, order 5 — or print one at home, fold it, and hold it. Half the errors in a trifold are only visible folded.

Generate the Northside Physio outside sheet in Studio → — then swap the clinic name for yours and edit from there.

Three mistakes that show up in almost every draft

Designing the inside as three unrelated columns. The spread is read as one page. Three separate headers, three separate color blocks and three different alignments make it feel like three brochures that happen to be adjacent. Pick one grid, one baseline, one accent color across all three.

Filling the flap with the founder's story. The flap is prime real estate and it keeps getting used for the least urgent content on the sheet. Give it the thing that unblocks the reader.

Type that shrinks to fit. If the copy doesn't fit at 9–10pt body, the copy is too long — that's the finding, not a formatting problem. Cut a section entirely rather than dropping to 7pt. A brochure with four things on it beats one with eleven things nobody read.

Related: if you're producing single-surface print too, the same content-first logic applies to flyers — one message, big, with room around it.

Print one before you print five hundred

A trifold is one of the few design jobs where a sheet of paper catches nearly every mistake. Print it, fold it, lay it face-up on a table, and hand it to someone who's never seen it. Watch which panel they read first and where they stop. That test has never once told me nothing.

Start your trifold in Ridvay Studio — describe your panels, get editable layers back, and fix the folds before the printer does it for you.