Fold Editions

A publishing identity built on the sheet rather than the mark. Every book in the programme folds from one imposition scheme.

Fold Editions publishes eight to twelve art books a year, most of them in editions under a thousand, most of them with artists who have never made a book before. They arrived with a problem they had correctly diagnosed themselves: every title looked like a different publisher had made it, because in practice every title had been designed from scratch by whoever was free.

We were asked for an identity. What they needed was an imposition scheme. If the sheet is fixed, the page sizes are fixed; if the page sizes are fixed, the grid is fixed; and once the grid is fixed, a guest designer can be given real freedom without the programme coming apart. So the identity starts at the press and works outward, which is the opposite of the order these projects usually run in.

Cover run, two Pantone inks on 300gsm uncoated. Editions of 400 to 900; each cover is printed in-house.

The house reference shelf. Every title in the programme is set against these for spine weight before it goes to press.

Spine studies for the second series. Gold foil on cloth, 22mm to 41mm across, blocked at 140 degrees.

Fourteen titles have been produced on the system, eleven of them by designers outside the studio working from the standards document alone. Unit cost fell because every title now prints on one of three stock sizes, and the imprint page, the one element that never varies, is what makes them read as a series on a shelf.