\nOne\n of the cool things you can do with printed marketing that will never \nwork on a pdf or website is fold it. It\u2019s more than just greeting cards \nor A4 brochures folded into thirds. Folded marketing material allows you\n to break up long or complex information into easier to read chunks. \nFolding material also allows you to hide information so that when a \nperson opens it up they get a surprise of what\u2019s inside. There are also \nsuch things as designing for books and brochures where you want artwork \ninformation to go across two pages (a spread) to give it more impact. \nNow how you design your material to make use of it may seem confusing \nand you think that you would have to pay a designer a lot of money to \nset things up. The truth of it that you can do most of it yourself just \nby following a few common sense rules that I will outline here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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This\n is the first step in making things easier. At Copy Express we have \ntemplates that you can access to guide you through the steps of setting \nup a folded document. Another reason why it\u2019s good to talk to the \nprinters up front is to find out how they will do the finishing of the \nproduct for you. For example: roll folded A4 flyers, the ones folded \ninto thirds with one flap folded over the other, each printing company \ndoes it slightly differently; one will make the outer flap and middle \nsection 100mm wide and the inner flap 97mm, a second one might stagger \nsections width to 100\/99\/98mm, a third will make the outer flap and \ncenter panel 99mm wide and trim the inner flap to be 98mm. If the item \nhas more than 1 fold the order of how the pages are read depends on how \nthe order of how the paper is folded, maps being typical of this where \nthere are folds are at right angles to each other. By getting the \ncorrect template from the printing company, you will avoid designing \nyour contents in the wrong reading order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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To\n understand what I mean, take a normal sheet of a4 paper and fold into \nthirds like you get a letter from a bank. You can see that you can\u2019t \nfold the paper so each section is exactly the same size, one has to be \nsmaller to fit between the other two sections. This is because paper has\n a thickness, even though it\u2019s \u2018paper thin\u2019 and you have to allow for \neach fold. Also if the edge of a inner section is too close to a fold, \nit\u2019s harder to open flap. To deal with this different printing companies\n take different approaches to problem as sighted in my previous \nparagraph. Again using the template the printer company supplied or just\n talking to them will help ensure that you get the format for your \ndesign.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Printing\n is a physical\/practical process and as such is prone to what I call \nproduction shifting. While all printing companies endvor to have your \nmaterial printed perfectly, it\u2019s not a perfect world. The prints\u2019 \nposition on the sheet of paper can shift up to 0.5mm in each direction \non each side. The cutting alignment and also have up to 0.5mm movement \nin each direction. This is why we recommend at least a 3mm internal \nmargin for all important content to allow for this. With folding or \ncreasing, you are adding more steps which again can be out of alignment \nbecause of the shifting in the printing and cutting, or add a new one \ndue to the paper not feeding correctly at one point. As such you can\u2019t \nguarantee that artwork will end exactly on creases\/folds or that the \nmargins are going to be exactly even on every panel. this is why I \nrecommend having generous margins when having material being folded, at \nleast 4mm or more. That way if there is a shift problem, it\u2019s less \nobvious on a 5mm margin being out by 1mm than a 3mm one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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I\n know this sounds counter intuitive but there is a good reason why I say\n this. Paper has a thickness and this has to be allowed for when folding\n or creasing. When you unfold a sheet of paper you rarely if ever fold \nit flat, meaning that the gaps between contents in each panel become \nvisually closer even though they are no closer on the page. By using \ngenerous margins, this keeps everything looking balanced to the reader.\n Dealing with folds and creases in multipage documents are their own \nspecial area of discussion which I\u2019ve covered in Book terms for the non-bibliofile<\/a>\n . When dealing with card, you can\u2019t fold it easily on machines, so it\u2019s\n standard practice for all printers to supply it creased. Creasing is \nthe process where a metal bar is pressed into the card so a natural fold\n point is formed. Because it\u2019s a metal bar, this crease can be up to 2mm\n wide with a visible bend in the paper. While the bending only shortens \nthe paper by a small fraction, visually it becomes an \u2018edge\u2019 so text can\n look like it\u2019s being chopped off even though it\u2019s not. Again this is \nwhere using generous margins and working your design so that no \nimportant information is caught in the crease matters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n You\n are asking why should you have to flip some of the artwork if \neverything is going to be printed flat? It is because how it looks after\n it is folded decides how pages are orientated. Take for instance a \nlandscape greeting card, where the fold is at the top of the card. If \nyou fold it flat you will see that the front of the card is upside down \nto the rest of the card, because it has to be right side up when the \ncard is folded up. It can take a bit to get your head around how this \nworks but if you follow the templates the printer supplies you, then it \nwill tell you how the material is to be folded and which direction is \n\u2018up\u2019 for each panel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n A\n lot of people, even with the advice I\u2019ve given here, can still get \nconfused on how to set up a folded flyer or card. Here is a the simplest\n bit of advice I can give: design it as a series of pages and let us at \nCopy Express sort out the reading order. Using our example of a A4 \nfolded into thirds, what you would do is setup 6 panels each 99x210mm in\n size and put the content into reading order (unless you\u2019ve got a \nbackground image). Sent us the pdf and we would set them up as single A4\n sheet based on the style of folding you want and send you back the \nproof as a pdf and print a sample for you to inspect. From there it\u2019s \neasy to make sure everything looks right and it all reads in the correct\n order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of \ncourse there is a lot you can do with folded marketing material which \nI\u2019ve not covered here. You could use a non standard size and number of \nfolds for a flyer to stand out from the crowd. Add a section that isn\u2019t a\n fold but a tear off card they can send back to you. With our specialist\n partners we can even create flyers that has punch out section. If you \nwant to explore the world of folded\/creased marketing material why not \nemail or call us today.\n\n<\/p>\n ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the cool things you can do with printed marketing that will never work on a pdf or website is fold it. It\u2019s more than just greeting cards or A4 brochures folded into thirds. Folded marketing material allows you to break up long or complex information into easier to read chunks. Folding material also … Continue reading “Fun with folds – How to design for folded marketing material”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":584,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=583"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":919,"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583\/revisions\/919"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Horizontal folds may mean vertically flipping some of your artwork
<\/h3>\n\n\n\nDesign by panel not by sheet.
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