I’m interested in how other designers prepare packaging artwork for commercial printing. Do you usually set up the dieline, bleed, color mode, and overprint settings yourself, or does the printer handle some of these prepress steps? I’d especially like to hear how designers avoid issues with small text and fine details after printing.
Depends on if you are creating custom dielines or using templates.
Always talk to the printer before even beginning the design. Find out what their preferences are regarding bleed, color mode and overprint settings. I would never ask a printer to pull bleeds for me after the fact but it’s good to know how much they want. You might ask them for samples of small text or detailed art to see how their presses handle what you have in mind. They may have preprinted things or you can pay to have a proof sample done from your own art.
Small text and fine details are not dealt with after printing. If in doubt, print it out. I find it weird these days that designers don’t have access to a simple desktop printer to check fine details or image resolution.
I set up as much as possible myself, but I wouldn’t start building packaging artwork around a dieline unless I knew it was correct.
Ideally the printer supplies the dieline, or if I’ve created it, they’ve confirmed and approved it before I go any further. There’s little point producing finished artwork around a structure that later turns out not to be manufacturable.
Bleed, colour setup, overprints, knockouts, spot colours etc. I would absolutely expect to be dealt with at artwork stage. The better the file is going into prepress, the less opportunity there is for something to go wrong later.
That doesn’t mean prepress has no role, though. Good prepress should be checking what they receive. Some printers will more or less take a GIGO approach, garbage in, garbage out, while others are extremely diligent, flag anything questionable and either ask you to correct it or offer to correct it themselves.
That’s why having a good relationship with the printer is so important.
For small text and fine detail, I’d actually go back even further establish production limitations before even designing it.
What is the minimum positive type size? What about reversed type? Minimum line weight? Minimum gap? Registration tolerance? Can that intricate die-cut actually be manufactured reliably? Those answers can also change depending on the process, substrate, inks and finishing involved. These are aboslutely conversations that need to happen before designing.
And proofs matter too. A RIP’d digital proof is useful because you can check what actually went through their RIP against the artwork you supplied, separations, overprints, transparency, missing elements etc. A physical/contract or press proof, where appropriate, tells you considerably more about how the finished piece is likely to reproduce.
Trish Witkowski from Foldfactory has a phrase I’ve always liked: “Think finishing at the beginning.”
I think that’s really the common theme in what @PrintDriver and I are saying talk to your print provider and involve them early.
People sometimes imagine the workflow as:
Client - Designer - Prepress - Press
when in reality the better relationship is:
Client ↔ Designer ↔ Prepress/Press
The designer is effectively the coordination point between the client’s idea and the finished manufactured piece. You need to understand enough about what happens downstream to design something that can actually be produced reliably.
That makes sense. I especially like the point about checking a physical print before sending the artwork to press. A desktop proof may not match the final production exactly, but it can still catch small text, spacing, image resolution, and fine-detail issues early. Getting the printer’s specifications before building the dieline also seems like it can prevent a lot of unnecessary revisions.
That’s a really good point about treating production limitations as part of the design brief rather than something to solve at the end. The minimum type size, line weight, registration tolerance, substrate, and finishing process can all affect what is actually practical to design.
I also like the Client ↔ Designer ↔ Prepress/Press workflow. It makes sense to get those conversations started before the artwork is fully developed, especially when the packaging has complex cuts or finishing. The point about checking the RIP’d proof is useful too, since some issues may not be obvious from the Illustrator file alone.
I’m puzzled. A desktop printer proof cannot be used to check resolution and certainly isn’t needed to check for small text and detail issues. Standard resolution for handheld-size printing is ~250–300 ppi, and you can see on your monitor whether the text and other details are too small. I’m obviously missing something in what you’re referring to, but I don’t know what it might be.
Once it’s printed, it’s printed. It’s too late to fix small text and fine details. Once again, am I misunderstanding something?
Apologies for chiming in.
But certainly for large format printing I printed out from a desktop office printer at full size and pieced it together with scotch tape and then make it on the wall and stand at the distance.
At full size you can see if the text is large enough or too small.
As for resolution, yes the desktop printer is lower res, but if it’s ok looking on the printout - then I can definitely make the correct analysis that off a professional grade printing it should be same at least if not better.
There have been times I’ve requested from the printer sections of the print area as a print sample and they’re happy to run a sliver of the design in question at the end of another print run on the machine they will use and RIPd and all that - printed as normal just tagged on to a similar job. And they have sent me samples this way too.
It costs them nothing to do, barely nothing. And everyone is happy.
But you’d need a good relationship with them. At the time I was working for a Print Logistics company and we were sending thousands of Euros of work a week.
So they were very obliging.
That came from a comment of mine. It isn’t just wide format where a desktop inkjet is helpful. Beginners and sometimes even skilled designers can’t often visualize just how small some text might be. I do small panels all the time for museum labels. While ADA guidelines are helpful, things like photo credits push the limits of my equipment in their tiny-ness. And I’m constantly baffled by low rez imagery even on small descriptive panels. I can sometimes blame inexperience and InDesign and the “oh,it’s just the low rez preview, I don’t need to check that image rez” attitude. But it happens a lot where I also hear, “oh thanks for flagging that, I wasn’t sure how bad it would be at full scale.”
I can understand printing a small section of large-format work, pinning it to a wall, and walking away to the typical viewing distance to see whether the text is readable, but readability and legibility are different from resolution. Also, text should be vector artwork, so it renders at the output device’s maximum resolution, not the lower resolution of any accompanying bitmapped artwork.
There’s also good reason for those unfamiliar with how resolution relates to viewing distance to tape a few sheets together at 100% size and pin them on the wall to see how far away you can stand before low-resolution blur becomes a problem.
However, my response was from the viewpoint of the original question: packaging and packaging die cuts, which doesn’t suggest large format, but might involve label legibility on a store aisle shelf. There are lots of variables, and I’m not sure the OP realized the subject had shifted from something that probably needed to be legible at 18 inches with adequate resolution to large-format work typically viewed from farther away.
This is helpful, especially the point about getting the printer involved before the artwork is fully developed.
In my work with Silver Edge Packaging, I’ve also found that packaging files can look fine on screen but raise different questions once you consider the actual substrate, finishing, dieline, and production process. Something as simple as small reversed text or a thin line can behave differently depending on the material and print method.
I also like the idea of checking production limitations before designing rather than trying to fix everything during prepress. It seems much easier to prevent those problems at the artwork stage than to discover them after the file has already gone into production.
The “think finishing at the beginning” point is a good takeaway too. Packaging design really does require thinking beyond just how the artwork looks on the screen.