What this template is
A birthday paper is a joke that lasts, which is a harder brief than it sounds. The layout gives you the two things that make the joke land: a masthead that looks like a real paper, and a headline big enough to be read across a room. Everything else on the front page is a photograph and a short article, because the fewer elements there are, the more the joke carries.
The inside page is a timeline. A row for each milestone, the label on one side and the detail on the other, next to a photograph and a short column. It reads as a life rather than as a list, and it gives the family somewhere to put the stories that get told every year anyway.
How to fill it in
Do the front page headline last. Write the timeline first, and the headline usually falls out of it: the funniest line is almost always one of the milestones, phrased as news.
The year they were born box on the front is worth filling properly. The number one single, the price of a loaf and who was in charge are the details people read out loud, and they are easy to look up. Get them right; a wrong one is the only thing anybody will mention.
Use an old photograph rather than a recent one. Newsprint flatters old photographs, and the contrast between a fifty-year-old picture and a headline about this week is most of the effect.
What usually goes wrong
The common mistake is cramming. A birthday paper with six stories on the front is a newsletter, not a joke. One headline, one picture, one article.
The second is printing one copy. Short-run printers have minimums, usually somewhere between twenty five and fifty, and the price per copy at the minimum is low enough that everyone at the party can take one. Check the minimum before you design around a single copy.
The third is leaving the placeholder jokes in. They are ours, not yours, and they are not funny about a person we have never met.
Opening and editing the files
The PDF holds both pages and is the one to look at first. It is drawn at the exact document size for the format you chose, so printing it at a hundred percent gives you a true proof of the layout. Use it to check the design before you commit to editing anything.
The two SVGs are the editable version. Every headline, caption and paragraph is real text rather than an outline, so you can click into it and type. They open in Inkscape, which is free, and in Illustrator, Affinity Designer and Figma. The photograph placeholders are plain rectangles; delete one and put your own picture in its place, keeping to the same box so the text around it does not have to move.
The template is set in the standard PDF serif and sans faces, which is deliberate: they are the faces that exist everywhere, so the file looks the same on your machine as it does on ours and on the printer's. If you would rather use something else, the guide to newsprint fonts covers what survives at small sizes on absorbent paper, which is a narrower field than it looks.
Before you order
Check the page count rule for the format you have chosen. Most of the printers here work in multiples of four, one works in multiples of eight, and one publishes no rule at all. The margin and safe area calculator will check a page count against a format, and the format's own specification page carries the full rules on colour, resolution and export settings.
Check your photographs at the size you are actually printing them rather than at the size they look on screen. The image DPI checker gives you the effective resolution and tells you the largest a picture can safely go. Newsprint is absorbent and loses fine detail, so a photograph that is marginal on screen will be worse on paper.
Then export a proof PDF and run it through your printer's own preflight before you pay for anything. Every figure in this template came from that printer's published guidelines on the date shown below, but presses vary and guidelines get revised.
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.
Figures on this page come from Newspaper Club artwork guidelines, read on 2026-08-20. Presses vary and printers revise their guidelines, so run a test PDF through their own preflight before you order.