One thing that you’ll want to know how to do when you’re creating customized packaging, is make printing files for this.

Designing the right printing files is vital to your project’s success. This is because the source files have all of the information necessary to create great graphics, and results with the colors, and there are different elements which are positioned and designed based on the rules to avoid the ongoing problems with printing.

Most printing files must be created in what’s called CMYK mode to start with.

You can download different die cut templates that have printing files.  Your die cut is made up of three different kinds of paths. The green lines, which talk about the way the artwork needs to be extended outwards, the blue lines that talk about where the artwork will have some trimming, and then red lines that indicate the precise location for folding and scoring the box. 

The colors as well must not be used in the printing files that are there, because they do represent the way that the manufacturing information works. Some graphic elements that are realized through the spot colors options are not printed, or they may indeed get processed by the colors used for manufacturing.

Some beginners will look at this and think that their graphics should not cross the lines to cut.  This, however, is an incorrect thought, and ultimately, it depends on every single case. If you’ve got a background that’s colored, or an image that’s extended outwards towards these green boarders, during the creasing and die cutting part of this, your paperboard sheets might have some level of displacement based on microns, which is precisely why these graphics must be extended in order to bleed out so that the border isn’t totally white. 

Due to the requirements for the sheets, it’s vital to put together pictures, texts, and symbols that are 3/5 of a mm minimum from both the red and the blue lines, in order to stop them from being cut up, or on the crease itself. 

When you do this, try to overprint, because for these templates, this properly manages the colors. Be default as well, when you print out these colors and they overlap, the top color usually knocks out those under all of this.

Overprinting is oftentimes used to prevent the knockout of these colors, making them seem more transparent when it’s done in relation to the ink that’s underlying.

It’s vital to ensure that overprinting is done for the text in black that’s placed within backgrounds that are colored so that they aren’t out of register, a term that means that the text is not overlapping with backgrounds.

If this is not overprinted, there’s a white, bordered part of each of these typefaces.

In order to set the overprinting in your photo editing software, you’ve got to select the die cut layers, place this forward, and from there, choose the multiply layer effects. 

Then there is the black that goes along with this in the background colors, and the percentages are usually 100 just for the K a value. But, if you want to; enjoy a black background, and the K provided is not enough, you will have to change out the values of this, and the percentages ultimately depend on the technologies used. 

For images with higher resolutions, you want to make sure that the images, texts, and logos orientation is done based on what’s on the box.  Die cut templates show these external sides of the packaging as it’s opened, and each side makes the last part of the box.