Packaging that survives a shelf and a print run.
Packs designed to be picked up and to be printed: concept, structure, dielines and artwork your printer accepts without a phone call.
- Typical length
- Six to ten weeks
- Ends with
- Print-ready artwork
- Includes
- Dielines and prepress
What packaging design has to survive
A pack has about three seconds on a shelf, next to competitors doing the same job, under lighting nobody designed for. It then has to survive a print run, a substrate that absorbs ink differently to the proof, a folding machine, a supply chain and a regulator who cares about declarations and nothing at all about layout.
Most packaging that fails does so at the second stage. The design was approved on screen and then met a printer, a dieline that was drawn from a photograph, or a legal requirement nobody had checked. That is why prepress sits inside this scope and not outside it.
We work from the structure outward. What the pack is made of, how it opens, what the dieline actually is, and where the fold and the seam fall, before any layout is drawn. A beautiful front panel with the barcode across a crease is a common and entirely avoidable outcome.
We work across FMCG, food, agricultural inputs and industrial products, and the constraints differ sharply between them. A pesticide label carries mandatory content in a mandated hierarchy; a food pack carries declarations that change by market; an industrial drum has handling marks that are not negotiable. We work those in first, because designing around them at the end is where the cost is.
Scope
What is included
Structure and dielines
Substrate, format and construction agreed with your printer or converter, with the dieline drawn or verified, never traced from a photograph. Everything after this depends on it being right.
Shelf and category audit
What the pack will actually stand beside, photographed on a real shelf where we can. Designing against a category you have only seen online is how a pack disappears in the store.
Concepts and routes
Two or three routes shown on the real dieline and mocked up in three dimensions, so a decision is made about a pack rather than about a flat image.
Compliance and declarations
Mandatory content laid out in the hierarchy the regulator requires, with your legal or regulatory team signing off before artwork is prepared, while a change still costs nothing.
Print-ready artwork
Correct colour space, spot colours specified, overprint and trapping set, bleed and varnish layers separated, barcodes at a tested magnification. Supplied the way your printer asks for it.
Range and variant rollout
Once the master pack is settled, the rest of the range is built on it so the family reads as a family and a new variant takes days rather than weeks.
How it runs
Weeks one and two
Structure, substrate and dielines agreed with your printer, plus the shelf and category audit. Regulatory requirements are listed here, at the point where they are cheap to design around.
Weeks three to six
Two or three routes on the real dieline, mocked up in three dimensions and shown at shelf distance. The chosen route is refined over three rounds, with compliance sign-off built into the schedule.
Weeks seven to ten
Print-ready artwork prepared and checked, a press proof reviewed where the run justifies it, and the rest of the range built off the approved master.
What you get
- Approved dielines for every pack in the range
- Print-ready artwork in your printer's required format, with colours specified
- Three-dimensional mock-ups and shelf visuals for internal approval
- A packaging guideline covering the range and how a new variant is built
- Every working file, layered and named
How it is judged
- Whether the pack is found on shelf in the category it competes in
- Whether the print run comes back matching the proof
- How long a new variant takes to produce once the system exists
- Whether the regulatory review passes first time
Questions we get asked
Do you deal with our printer?
Who is responsible if the print run is wrong?
Can you handle regulatory content?
How many packs can we do at once?
Do you do photography for the pack?
What if we already have a pack we like?
Next
Send us the product and the shelf
A photograph of the product, a photograph of the shelf it competes on, and the name of your printer. That is enough for us to tell you what the job actually involves and roughly what it costs.
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The work behind this