A box is a structural problem wearing a graphic-design costume. It has to fold, survive a supply chain, and still read on a shelf from eight feet away.
What we design
- Retail packaging — cartons, sleeves, boxes. Built on a real dieline, with bleed, safe area and fold allowances that match what your printer asked for.
- Labels — including the awkward ones: curved surfaces, small mandatory copy, and the regulatory text that has to fit whether or not it wants to.
- Inserts and instruction sheets — see below. Often the same project as the packaging itself, and usually better if it is.
- Catalogues and print collateral — multi-page work where the grid has to hold up across fifty spreads rather than one.
The insert in the box
The instruction sheet is part of the packaging job more often than not, and it is the part a photograph cannot do. A photo shows everything in the frame with equal emphasis, including the eleven things that do not matter at this step. A drawing can leave things out — fade the parts already fitted, cut away a housing, and put the emphasis exactly on the quarter-turn everyone gets wrong.
Step sequences, exploded views, cutaways, and parts lists that agree with the drawing rather than contradicting it. If your support inbox has a recurring question about one particular step, that is usually a drawing problem and it is usually fixable. More on illustration.
Why the printer’s spec comes first
Packaging is where a beautiful file is worth nothing. Prepress will reject a design that ignores the caliper of the board, and a mockup that looked right on screen can lose a third of its type into a fold. So the process runs backwards from the printer: their spec, then the dieline, then the design inside the space that is genuinely available.
If you already have a printer, their template is the first thing we ask for. If you don’t, we will design to a common spec and flag what has to be confirmed before anything goes to plate.
Packaging and the rest of the launch
Packaging is where an inconsistent brand becomes most obvious, because the box and the product photograph get seen next to each other. If the identity is already settled we work inside it; if it isn’t, this is often the moment it needs to be — see brand identity.