IN AMERICA, they use US Letter as their standard paper size. In Europe, we use A4. It’s not just a matter of national preference: A4 – 297 x 210 mm – is, by any reckoning, a much better size.
Why? Because if you fold a sheet of A4 in half, you get a sheet of A5. Its proportions are exactly designed so that’s the case, and there are no other proportions – certainly not US Letter – for which that’s the case.
But it gets cleverer than that. Double a sheet of A4 and you get A3. Double it again and you get A2. Again, and you get A1. And if you double A1, you get A0. And the real genius of that is that a sheet of A0 has a surface area of almost exactly one square metre.
Let’s say you’re designing a 32-page A4 booklet, which is 16 pages of A4 (each page being double sided), and its going to be printed on 160gsm (grammes per square metre) paper. How much will it cost to post? Well, you’ll know that because 16 sheets of A4 is the same as one sheet of A0, it will weigh exactly 160 grammes. Clever stuff.
