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Above the fold

Challenger Explodes in Flames The Post Standard (Syracuse, New York)

Terror Hits Home (pdf) Houston Chronicle

Pontiff is at Peace (pdf) Daily Herald (Suburban Chicago)

Saints Go Marching In (pdf) Akron Beacon Journal

All of the previous newspaper headlines were found above the fold (see the wikipedia definition,) a term still relevant today in web design. For a web designer planning a site, important information is put in an area of prominence, or above the fold. Many sites are designed so that all the information falls within the visible screen area, not needing to be scrolled to view. Well of course there is the concept of fluid grids, implemented when screen sizes began to rapidly change and even shrunk to mobile phone size. As a visual based designer who's coding experience is mostly front end and who has little love of "whiz bang" special effects on a site, I don't care much for reposition-able sites...but I digress.


For a designer visiting a site, nothing is more distracting than useless information above the fold. It falls right into the same old, bad design choices of Red type on a blue background, cutesy animated gifs and the fonts curlz or comic sans. As a designer with a love of fine arts, I strongly believe we can not abandon visually pleasing functionality, simply to implement large web 2.0 art and blocks of content. Lets embrace the terms and concepts of the past. We all learn from the past including the recent publishing and print design past. On websites, don't push content out of the way forcing visitors to scroll to find it below the fold. Find creative ways to implement these functional pieces that some want for mobile devices, while keeping a website visited with a computer an interesting and appealing visual layout.


* Image: Resonate Design Studios website. Example of a site that displays the information above the fold, and viewed within a controlled layout, so elements display in a visually pleasing arrangement.
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