Laid out, not blank

The other set of templates on this site gives you a correct empty page: the right size, the right margins, a column grid, nothing else. These are the opposite. Each one is a finished front page and a finished inside page, with a masthead, a folio line, a lead story with a standfirst and a byline, a photograph with a caption, a ruled box and a row of short items. You replace the words and the pictures and it is done.

Every design exists in all twelve formats, and it is redrawn for each rather than resized. That distinction matters more than it sounds. A layout scaled from an American tabloid to a British broadsheet ends up with columns nobody can read and margins nobody asked for. Here the column count is chosen per format to keep the measure close to what reads comfortably, so the same design comes out as three columns on a mini and six on a broadsheet, and both of them are still that printer's margins.

The check that matters

A designed template can be wrong in a way a blank one cannot: a headline one point too big, a caption one line too long, a box that grew because somebody added an item to a list. Any of those puts ink where the printer said not to put it, and none of them announce themselves.

So the build renders every page of every design and inspects the margin pixel by pixel. If anything but bare paper is found outside the printable area, the build stops and nothing is published. That is 384 rendered pages checked on every deploy, which is the only honest way to say that these fit.

What is in each download

A two page PDF holding the front page and the inside page at the exact document size for that format, and the same two pages as separate SVGs. The PDF is your proof: print it at a hundred percent and you are looking at the real thing. The SVGs are the working files, with real editable text, and they open in Inkscape, Illustrator, Affinity Designer and Figma.

There is also a zip per design holding all twelve formats and a read me, for anyone who has not decided on a printer yet.

Before you order

Check the page count rule for your format on its specification page, check your photographs with the image DPI checker, and export a proof through your printer's own preflight. If you would rather start from nothing, the blank templates give you the grid alone.

About the photographs

The pictures in these templates are placeholders and you are meant to replace them. They are here because a template with an empty grey box does not show you what your paper will look like, and because a page with a photograph on it is laid out differently from one without.

Every one is public domain or CC0, taken from Wikimedia Commons, and the build refuses any image whose licence asks for attribution. That rule exists for your sake rather than ours: an attribution requirement cannot survive somebody opening the file, deleting a caption and sending it to a press. So if you print these pages exactly as they are, including commercially, you owe nobody anything. The sources are listed anyway, because you should be able to check rather than take our word for it.