Drawing for packaging: think in cornersDrawing for packaging: think in corners

A box is six pictures that have to get along. When I started drawing packaging, I designed the front, then the back, then the sides, like four separate posters. On screen it looked great. On a shelf it looked like four different products sharing one box.

A box is six pictures

The flat file you draw on is called a dieline: the box unfolded, with every panel laid out like a cross. It’s lovely to look at and it lies to you. It makes every panel look equally important and completely separate.

In real life nobody sees a box flat. They see it in three dimensions, in their hand or on a shelf, and almost never from straight ahead.

The dieline is still where the finished file lives. It’s just not where the thinking happens.

Shelves show corners

Stand in a shop and look at the shelves. You don’t see fronts; you see corners. Two faces of every box at once, the front and one side, meeting along an edge. That edge is the most important line on the whole package, and on most dielines it’s just a fold mark.

The top matters too. In a lot of shops the bottom shelves sit below your knees, so people see the lid first. If the lid is blank, the box is invisible to anyone who isn’t kneeling.

So now I design the corner first. I fold a blank box, turn it forty-five degrees and draw on that. Whatever happens across the edge, an arm reaching round, a pattern bending, a word that starts on the front and finishes on the side, is what people will actually see.

if it only works from the front, it only works in the photo for the website.

Drawings that wrap

My favourite packaging drawings don’t stop at the edges. A tail that starts on the front and ends on the back. A landscape that carries on all the way round, so the box becomes a little world. A character peeking round the side as if checking the coast is clear.

Wrapping drawings take planning. Each fold has to land in a sensible place: not across a face, not through the middle of a word. I mark the folds on my sketches early and move the drawing until the important bits sit safely on one panel.

Colour on cardboard

Screens glow and cardboard doesn’t. A yellow that sings on my monitor can print as something closer to mustard, especially on brown board, which drinks ink. So I ask early what the box is made of, and I get a printed colour test before I commit to a palette.

Brown board can be lovely, but it changes the rules. White ink becomes a colour of its own, and anything pale needs a white layer underneath or it disappears. I’ve learned to design for the board, not despite it. Some of my favourite boxes use two inks and a lot of cardboard.

The dieline is part of the drawing

The technical stuff isn’t separate from the art. The glue flap, the tuck-in lid and the bleed that gets trimmed off all change what the customer sees.

1. Keep important things at least five millimetres from any fold or cut.

2. Carry the drawing past the edges into the bleed, so trimming never leaves a white line.

3. Check which way up each panel is. Lids flip. I have drawn upside-down cats.

4. Ask the printer for their dieline before you start, not after.

Barcodes are neighbours too

Every box has things on it that I didn’t draw: a barcode, ingredients, recycling marks, a legal line in tiny type. Treat them as part of the composition from the first day. They’re not going anywhere, and they always need more space than you hoped.

I once drew a cat sleeping on a back panel. Then the barcode arrived and landed exactly on the cat. Now I draw the boring boxes first, as grey rectangles, and draw around them.

Fold it before you finish it. Every time.

Print it, fold it, shelve it

Before I send any packaging to a client, I print it at full size, cut it out, fold it and put it on a real shelf next to real products. Then I walk past it, the way a tired person walks past a shelf at six in the evening.

If I notice it in that first second, the corner is working. If I don’t, it doesn’t matter how good the front is. I folded fourteen boxes for the last job. Thirteen went in the recycling. The fourteenth is on my desk, and it still makes me happy every time I walk past it.