Landscape or Portrait?

The orientation of a binder is something that is not discussed a lot. This is mainly because the general public assumes that they all come in the portrait orientation – which is the standard orientation for most documents; letters, contracts, application forms, handouts/flyers, etc. all usually come in the portrait format. That’s why most binders are portrait so that it can be used to organize these documents. The orientation opposite of portrait is landscape. This orientation is not as common, but is used in several other situations and can be just as useful. For example, people use the orientation for charts, graphs, or spreadsheets.

In terms of binders, there is not a lot of selection when it comes to binders in landscape formats.  Although people use landscape documents, landscape binders are somewhat hard to find. You’ll be surprised at how many brands actually offer landscape binders for the typical sizes like the letter size or legal size, let along the odd sizes like 17x11 or 14x11. However, you will find that at Keepfiling we offer landscape binders in several sizes, at a very reasonable price.

Currently Keepfiling has landscape binders available for the letter size and 17x11 papers.  We will add to the collection a legal size and 14x11 landscape binder in the coming month, so stay tuned!

Letter size landscape binder, and 17x11 landscape binder

When talking about landscape orientation documents, most people would associate them to artworks like paintings and drawings, or business documents like organization charts, graphs, or spreadsheets. This is because landscape paper provides a wide canvas or space to display their works. For example a painter might be painting the skyline of Chicago, and working on a landscape paper allows him to capture more of the skyline at once than compared to if he was using a portrait paper. Same with businesses, the extra width allows for more information to be display at once like on a spreadsheet with a lot of columns of data. Artists can use the landscape binder as a portfolio to showcase their artwork. Businesses can use the landscape binder as a report to show their numbers, calculations, graphs, charts, etc.

You can also use landscape binders to organize genealogy documents like a family tree, which similar to a business organization charts, can become very wide as you continue down from the top of the chart to the bottom. Another way that you can use the landscape binders is to help organize timetables or schedules. You can fit more information on a timetable or schedule that is printed on landscape paper. Then you can use binders to keep track of these timetables and schedules as reference or just for record. So you ask, landscape or portrait? Well it really depends on what you’re trying to achieve.

Not only does binders and sheet protectors come in different orientations, but also computer monitors nowadays are suited for both landscape and portrait orientation. Monitors are generally of landscape orientation. The landscape view gives viewers more information to view at once without having to scroll down pages, compared to if monitors were in portrait orientation. However, today, there are monitors can be rotated from landscape orientation to portrait orientation. This gives users, especially editors for magazines and other booklets, a ‘true’ view of the page under portrait orientation.  Even TV monitors today are made in the landscape format, as compared to the box shape that they use to be in.

   Some monitors today can rotate from landscape orientation to portrait orientation,
in order to fulfill different user needs.