Above the Fold
Also known as: ATF
Content visible on screen before the user scrolls.
Above the fold is a print term that survived because the psychology is real: users commit to a page based on what they see instantly. On mobile, that's roughly the top 640px.
Definition
Above the fold is the portion of a landing page — or an ad creative — visible without any scroll. Its dimensions vary by device but the concept holds: what people see immediately dominates their decision.
Why it matters
Users make a stay/leave decision in the first 3 seconds. Everything critical — value prop, offer, CTA, primary product image — belongs above the fold.
Above the Fold in practice
Above the fold is the portion of a landing page — or an ad creative — visible without any scroll. Its dimensions vary by device but the concept holds: what people see immediately dominates their decision. Production concepts decide whether creative can be made at catalog scale or only for hero moments. Anything that requires a person to open a canvas per SKU stops working around the fortieth product. The brands that ship the most variants treat production as a system of templates, rules and specs rather than a series of one-off files. Read it next to Below the Fold, Hero Image, Landing Page.
How to get it right
Define it once, then apply it everywhere. Lock type ramp, palette, logo placement, offer treatment and legal lines in a shared brand system, and build templates that accept the product feed as input. Every export should already respect the placement's safe zones so nothing needs a manual crop after the fact.
What to measure and watch
Quality control is checkable, not subjective: does the asset meet the platform's ratio and file requirements, does key content sit inside the safe area, is text legible at thumbnail size, and does the product read in the first frame? Run that checklist before spend, because rejections and silent crops cost more than the render did. Why this matters commercially: Users make a stay/leave decision in the first 3 seconds. Everything critical — value prop, offer, CTA, primary product image — belongs above the fold.
Where Above the Fold sits in an agentic creative workflow
In Xeli this is a rule an agent enforces, not a note in a brief. Templates read the catalog, respect the brand system, and output every required ratio for every SKU at ad-ready resolution — so a 400-product drop becomes a queue to approve rather than a month of files. In the context of creative & production, that means the concept stops being something a person re-applies by hand every campaign and becomes a rule the system enforces on every asset it produces.