At first glance, it can seem a little confusing when you open a new packaging dieline. There are solid lines, dashed lines, skinny flaps, and lots of little pieces of cardboard all connected with each other. It looks more like a diagram to a professional than a place for creative work. However, a dieline is actually just a blueprint that shows how your label, carton, or sleeve will be printed, cut, folded, and assembled. If you read through a dieline carefully before laying out your artwork, you can avoid things like text on folds, cut-off logos, and valuable information on the wrong panel.
First thing: Create a copy of the dieline and mark it up with the names of its major parts. Make sure you know which panel is your front, back, sides, top, bottom, and glue flap. Panel shape alone can sometimes be misleading, since a long rectangle could actually be a side rather than a front. It helps to actually make your carton out of the dieline. Print it out and cut around the edges, then score and fold it along the lines marked, loosely building the carton out of the flattened shape. Once you see how it all becomes a physical box, the relationship between the panels becomes much clearer.
The lines that are meant to be trimmed off after finishing your package will be marked as a cut line. Fold lines show where to bend the material, and you’ll find the glue flap to close your package together there. All of this is meant to sit in a separate technical layer and not become part of your design. Make sure that your product names, small text, icons, and other critical pieces all stay clear of both cut lines and fold lines. You don’t want to have something readable on paper be hard to read just because a fold is nearby, even if it wasn’t supposed to get trimmed off.
While bleed and safe area are similar, they serve different roles. Bleed refers to extending your backgrounds, graphics, colors, or patterns past the cut lines so that there are no white edges if you end up being off when your cut line was made. Safe area is the inner section of your panel and acts as a general area of where you can safely place important content. Your background color may safely extend into the bleed, while your logo and net quantity should be within the bounds of the safe area. It is important to note that all of this is to help you in your design, not necessarily for the final product to show in your artwork.
If you don’t pay attention to orientation, some of these panels may look like they are upside down in your artwork, because they will turn upright after they get folded up. Try writing “TOP” on each panel, print the design and fold it all up again, so that you know that you have the orientation correct for the text and for all of your wraparound designs going the right way. It’s especially helpful if there’s any folding on top, bottom, or sides in the carton you are designing.
Keep your dieline visible during the design process, either by placing a layer that sits above the artwork at low opacity or by having it completely separate. Make sure to take time away from working in the technical view and look at a final version, just the design, without the dieline showing. The technical view helps you to check your panel boundaries, bleed, and fold lines; the other one is to show that you have a balanced design without your eye getting distracted by the extra design elements. A mockup of your final design is helpful, but remember to check that the mockup is the right artwork in the first place.
Take a close look over each edge before you submit. Is everything going where you wanted it to go? Are there any whites edges where you need a background bleed? Is anything that needs to be there safe inside the safe area? Is there any artwork where it should not be, like on the glue flap? Once you are sure everything is in order, print out your final design, fold and make the carton. Then, ask yourself one simple question while looking at the design: Is everything where you wanted it to be?