Working with a designer who had it right to begin with…

It started with a call from Matt Flick at SAA. Matt had designed a pocket folder for the Dayton Country Club that was  a little challenging. First, lets move back to last year. Matt had designed (4)  5.5 x 8.5 brochures for Golf, Weddings and  other events/services that DCC offers, so we needed to come with something that would hold all 4 brochure and actually display them (sorry, Matt had to design something to hold them) We could take  a regular 9 x 12 pocket folder, put the brochures inside so they stacked on top of each other, tumbled around (because they fit in so loose) and in the end looked like you just put 4 brochures in a pocket folder because you did not have a better way to hold them….or better yet, you didn’t have a “system” to hold them. So Matt came up with a pretty cool solution.

I stopped by to see Matt, and he had it all sketched out on a piece of 8.5 x 11 paper. It all seemed to make sense (at least on paper)…Print a big piece of paper 1/sided (28″ x 20″), fold it in half to make it 10 x 28, and then you could have 4 panels that were 7 x 10 when folded up, with a slit in each panel to hold a brochure. Heck, when folded and all four pieces inserted, it would even fit in a golf bag..imagine this, a guy could come out for a game of golf, grab info for the daughters wedding or what ever (even a class reunion), tuck it in the golf bag, play a round and have it when he gets home. Cool thing being that when you got it home, all 4 brochures fit real nicely inside and it was in real good shape.

It all made sense on paper, but… So I put together a dummy. I used the old light table and cut down a piece of 23 x 35 80# Gloss cover to 20 (tall) x 28 (wide), and folded it in half to 10 x 28 (I did have to use my blade to lightly cut a score into it so it would fold right). I had cut 4 slits before I folded it that were 5.9″ (those would hold the brochures, again, Matt’s idea). So I glued it up with a glue stick and then closed gate folded it into 4 panels of 7″. once again I had to put a light cut to act as a score and the fold was a little rough (a lot of paper in the middle, thus kind of buckling). A little rough, but I know it would work…the only worry was the buckling paper in the middle.

I talked to Mike at CFP (Custom Formed Products) and he thought he could make a die that would work and do the cutting, folding & Glueing. He also said we might need to cut relief slits on the 10″ x 28″ panel that was the “inside panel. That worried me a little, as we were only going to print on 1 side, and 1/8” relief slits would show white from the panel underneath, and the inside was flooded with green (like Country Club Green).

Well, at least at this point, we knew what it would take to get it done, the cost to do it, and had a real good idea of how it would work and what it would look like. Since it didn’t cost anything, we made cheap low res ink-jet and cut it out (with the relief slits) just to make sure, show it to the customer, and we all agreed it’s cool.

After a full color proof (and I’m not adding the part of what a totally cool piece this was, due to Matt’s awesome design skills), we printed the big sheets (added an aqueous coat to avoid fingerprints) and got them down to Mike to die cut. As always Custom Formed did a killer (precision) job of die cutting, folding in half, gluing and then closed gate folding them (gluing & folding by hand). Mike had made a die with all the scores, slits (relief slits + brochure slits) so that they just folded up perfect.

I guess that wasn’t that complicated a project, but it was just one of those special ones that I thought came our very cool. And it goes to show that even when at first, I thought this one might be clinging to a wing and a prayer to work, the designer had a vision and we worked it till we got the results we wanted.