From the course: Print Production: Folding

Folding families

From the course: Print Production: Folding

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Folding families

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- In this chapter, I'm going to show you how to identify folding styles. All folded materials have distinct characteristics that allow them to be classified into folding families. Why is this important? Knowing a bit about the different families will help you to understand your options when you begin thinking about a project and will help you to rule in or rule out different categories of folds based on your concept, content, and project specifications. It will also help you to describe or identify the things you see. How many times have you seen something interesting, a printed brochure or mail piece, and not known what it was and then maybe you wanted to describe it or share it and you didn't have the words? It's the difference between saying, "It was this cool kind of plus shaped thing that folded in and went around," and, "I saw a great iron-cross mailer," or, "It folded back and forth a few times "and then closed up," and, "It's a six panel wrapped accordion." Big difference. Fold-speak enhances your credibility and your communication with your printer. It just sounds professional and it's fun once you get the hang of it. To be able to properly identify brochure folds, it's important to understand what to look for, such as what characteristics make a roll fold different from a gate fold, et cetera. There are eight folding families. Accordions, basics, gate folds, maps, parallel folds, poster folds, the combo folds, roll folds, and everyone's favorite, specialty folds. There are two additional subcategories we'll cover that fall under the specialty umbrella: hybrid and composite formats, and proprietary formats. Folding families are at the foundation of all of my research and they're fun to learn about so watch each of the movies in this section and you'll have a good grasp of the different identifying characteristics of brochure folds.

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