How to Make a Funeral Program

A funeral program does three jobs at once: it guides the service, it tells the life story, and it becomes the keepsake people take home. Making one is not hard — but it has rules, and the worst week of your life is a bad time to learn them by trial and error. Here is the whole craft in one page.

Step 1 — Gather the six things

1. The full name, birth date, and date of passing.
2. A photo — one good portrait beats ten small ones. Recent or classic both work; choose the one the family sees them as.
3. The service details: date, time, venue, officiant.
4. The order of service from whoever leads it — hymns, readings, speakers, in order.
5. The obituary / life story (our examples by relationship help when the words won't come).
6. The acknowledgements — the family's thanks — and pallbearers if applicable.

Step 2 — Choose the format

A bifold (one folded sheet, four pages) fits most services: cover, order, story, back. Choose an 8-page booklet when the order is long, the story is full, or you want photo pages — the same folded sheets, two of them, stapled on the fold.

Step 3 — Lay it out (or let the editor do it)

The classic layout order: cover with "In Loving Memory of", the name, dates, and photo; order of service with each item and who takes it; the life story with the family list; and the back page with pallbearers, acknowledgements, and — often — a verse. In Word or Canva you'll wrestle margins and page order; in our editor you type the details and the booklet builds itself, in seven languages, with the folding handled.

Step 4 — The folding trap (why page 8 prints next to page 1)

Folded booklets are printed with pages rearranged on the sheet — for an 8-page booklet, page 8 and page 1 share a side. Print shops call this imposition, and it is the single most common DIY disaster: print "pages in order," fold, and everything is shuffled. Our PDF includes both the reading-order pages (for shops) and the correctly imposed duplex sheets (for home printing, "flip on long edge") — plus a one-page guide.

Step 5 — Print

• At a shop: hand over the PDF; ask for the reading-order pages as a folded booklet on 120–160gsm paper.
• At home: print only the sheet pages, duplex, flip on long edge, actual size — then fold and stack.
• Matte paper reads better than gloss in church lighting, and takes handwriting for keepsake notes.