Design
The fold is a lie we inherited from print
Move it above the fold. There is no fold.
Every few months a client asks us to move something up top: a phone number, a third call-to-action, the whole value proposition crammed into the top 600 pixels. The instinct feels like common sense. It comes from a place that has nothing to do with how anyone reads a website.
Nobody pays before they scroll. The fold on the web was never a fold at all, just the bottom edge of whatever monitor you happened to be designing on in 1998. And that edge moves.
It sits in a different place on a 27-inch iMac than on a phone in portrait. It moves when someone changes their zoom. There is no single line. We inherited a word for a thing that doesn't exist.
The edge moves.
Newspapers were folded in half on a newsstand. The buyer walking past only saw the top half, so editors stacked the biggest headline up there to land the sale. The fold was a constraint of paper on a rack. It existed because you bought the paper before you could open it. The top half did all the selling because the top half was all you got.
Designers carried the fold onto screens, pinning it to the bottom edge of a 1998 monitor. But the web has no rack, and nobody pays before they scroll. The borrowed word never fit the medium. iMac, phone, zoom level, the line lands somewhere different every time. The most valuable real estate is still the top of the page. Most valuable and the only thing people see are wildly different claims.
The fold is a lie we inherited.
Design for an imaginary line and you shrink the hero so a button fits, drop the font size so one more sentence clears the cut, and stack so much up top the page becomes a wall. A wall is exactly the thing people scroll past to escape.
Design for momentum.
The first screen has one job: make the second screen feel worth reaching. A clear honest line about what this is and who it is for. Enough room that the eye relaxes, the same restraint that makes whitespace do its job. A hint of the next section peeking up so scrolling feels like the obvious next move.
Build the rest like a sequence, each section earning the next, information appearing in the order a real person would want it. The page isn't a stack of priorities fighting for the top. It's a path, and every step exists to pull you to the one after it.
Two tests. If someone only read the first screen, would they want to keep going? And if they scrolled everything, did each section pull its weight? That's the sequencing we build into every project, laid out in how we build. The fold made sense when you were selling folded paper to someone walking past a newsstand. You're not. Design for the scroll.
The fold made sense when you were selling folded paper to someone walking past a newsstand. You're not.