06


Spring 2015


COVER STORY


From Folding Fanatic to Direct Mail Diva,


If it doesn’t exist, she creates it. That’s how Trish Witkowski rolls. Take this example. Early in her career, when she worked in the university publications department at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), they produced tons of print materials, but with just a handful of folding styles. “Once in a while, I would come across a printed piece folded in a way I had never seen before and didn’t know was possible,” Trish says. “If we had known about that fold format, maybe we could have used it on one of our projects to


TRISH WITKOWSKI Gets Real About Direct Mail


make it more interesting.” That frustration and the desire to know her options sparked her interest in the world of folds. The problem was, she couldn’t find


any information about folding. Nothing. She decided to do her master’s thesis on brochure folds for mass production. After completing two years of thesis research and getting her degree, Trish kept at the project for five more years. The result was an 850-page, two-volume folding resource for the printing industry.


Learning Fold Math Folding involves a lot of math, which means there’s a lot of opportunity for humans to make mistakes with their file setup. Once again, it was time to create something from nothing. “When you talk about folding in general, multiple panels have to get smaller as they fold into each other,” she explains. “So, we took the folding compensation mathematics from my folding research and applied them to a software program that would do the math for you—and this became the popular FOLDRite Template Builder service that we offer at Foldfactory today.”


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