The Right Tools for the Job

With very specialized cartons and shapes, for example, one important question becomes how best to use the available material during the production run. Another requirement is making sure the copy is appropriately visible and in the correct location on a 3D object.

“Without the right structural file, and without the right kinds of tools up front,” Harrell explains, “you might wind up with two identical tabs, left and right, and no clear way to know which tab folds under which. From a designer’s point of view, the tabs appear interchangeable. But the structural guy built the box so that it folds in a particular order and a particular way, so that thing you thought would show on the bottom winds up inside the box instead.”