What is a gutter in design?

One word for several gaps

The word comes from the channel that runs between things, and in print it names several such channels. A printing company's guide from Wallace Carlson describes gutters as vertical space between different print elements, applying to the space between columns, between facing pages in publications and even between multiple copies on a press sheet. On a single page flyer the column gutter is the one that matters. In magazines, catalogues and booklets the binding gutter matters as well, because the pages curve toward the spine. On folded brochures the same principle applies to the fold lines. Only the last kind, the space between copies on a press sheet, belongs entirely to the printer and needs no attention from the designer.

How wide a gutter should be

There is no industry standard; the same Wallace Carlson guide notes that, unlike bleed, there is no single standard for margin or gutter dimensions, because they depend on content, style and binding. What governs a column gutter is the text size. It has to be clearly wider than the space between words, or a reader's eye jumps across into the next column, and wider again when columns are justified or set in large type. On an A4 flyer with body text around 10 to 11 points, a gutter of about 4 to 6 millimetres is a sensible starting point. Columns themselves should not be too narrow either. Practical Typography suggests two or three columns on a standard page and calls four too many.

When the binding gutter matters

A stapled booklet of eight pages barely curves at the spine, but a perfect bound catalogue of eighty pages bends the inner edge of every page away from the reader. Designers compensate by making the inside margin wider than the outside margin, sometimes by a few millimetres and sometimes by more than a centimetre, depending on page count and binding method. Word processors call this setting a gutter margin. For wire or ring binding, the gutter must also clear the punched holes. Folded brochures need the same care at every fold: keep text, logos and faces several millimetres away from the crease, and let backgrounds run across the fold so the panels join cleanly.

Common mistakes

The most common is a column gutter so narrow that two columns read as one wide block, especially with ragged right text where the edges wander. The second is inconsistent gutters, where the gap between two photos differs from the gap between two text blocks, which makes a layout look accidental. The third is placing a headline across a binding gutter on a spread, so the middle letters vanish into the spine. The fourth is using the same margin on every side of a thick bound document, so the inner text feels buried. The last is filling gutters with rules or decorative lines when more space would separate the columns more clearly.

Gutters in the flyer builder

The flyer builder has no column guides, grid, rulers, snapping or gutter setting. Elements are placed with eight resize handles and nudged with the arrow keys, 1 pixel at a time or 10 with Shift held, so gutters are set by eye or with a temporary shape as a spacer. Designs from the library arrive with their boxes already positioned, so the simplest approach is to keep the existing gaps rather than dragging boxes closer together, and to match any new gap to one the design already uses. On the A4 canvas at 150 DPI, a 5 millimetre gutter is about 30 pixels. For folded brochures there are no fold guides either: on an A4 landscape page the fold lines of equal thirds fall at 584 and 1169 pixels, and text should stay about 30 pixels clear of each side.

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