Cardboard engineering ideas and promotional pop-up cards
Pop up products are popular with corporate customers as they allow their promotion to stand out from the crowd, but when the item they are trying to promote cannot be reproduced as a 3-D piece of cardboard engineering there is another way. Reproducing a shape in two dimensional stand-up or pop up form is much easier and therefore less expensive than an intricate 3-D creation and still gives that extra impact over a standard card or flyer. This is where bespoke pop-up cards come in to their own.
When producing bespoke pop-up cards the two main mechanisms are the “V” fold pop up and parallelogram stand-ups. The use of these simple but very effective formats helps to keep assembly costs down. From time to time, other cardboard engineering movements may also be brought into play such as pull tabs and rotating wheels but once again, the cardboard engineering methods employed are kept simple for rules of economy.
To be honest, a card with one simple V fold at the centre can be more effective than some of the most expensive and intricate hand made cards on the market where the instant impact can be lost in over-fussy design. Of course, it helps when your own graphics and choice of pop-up shape lend themselves to the style of product. A good example is seen on a pop-up card that we produced as a promotion for cold drinks. The colours are strong and bright and the pop-up shape is big and bold.
Promotional pop-up cards with a parallelogram mechanism tend not to be as dramatic as the V folds but it is a case of “horses for courses” as you might want a less dramatic effect. However, the stand-up scenario that the parallelogram creates is good as the card will happily stay in the right-angled position to create a desk-top display. This in itself might be an important consideration when making your choice regarding the style of card that is most suitable. Room settings are a popular choice for this type of card though we have made stand-up examples for all kinds of scenes and figures.
Creating a simple pop-up card in these styles is not particularly difficult and if we can help to guide you by pointing you in the right direction or giving instructions on how to create a pop up product or a product based on cardboard engineering techniques then we will “hold your hand” as far as we can through the design and prototype processes.
