Have Questions (Designing Brochure)

[Ronald]

Hi folks,
I'm currently designing a city brochure (glossy cover, 4"x9", 70-80 page, saddle stitched booklet) and I have a few questions. First off, I had to scan some ads from the old 2002 guide, cleaned them up, and gave them new, crisp text. I scanned at 600 resolution and after refining them in Illustrator/Photoshop CS2, I saved them as PDFs under the Illustrator default settings (and CMYK of course). This seems to retain high quality and looks good for printing. I imagine these specs will work well?

I'm laying out the actual brochure pages in InDesign, but one thing I find annoying is that, in InDesign, I can't just have an even amount of spread pages. There's always a solo top page, like a cover page. I'm having the pages laid out in about 3 or 4 separate documents (to be exported as PDFs), and I'd like to have a solo page on just the one file that includes the brochure cover (and probably the one with the back cover too, but as the bottom/final page of course). How can I accomplish this?

Maybe I'll post a link to a sample of the guide and get some reception on the design too.

Thanks much!