Picture the Perfect Package

Consider this: It might not have taken our ancestors thousands of years to perfect the working wheel if they’d had access to 3D visualization technologies.

Because new designs often incur unexpected problems, a physical prototype is often built to test the appearance and/or function of a new design before starting production. All prototypes have their genesis in two fundamental questions: What will it look like? and, How will it perform? Correctly executed, all prototypes also have in common an ability to speed the design process by enabling marketers, key decision makers, and retail buyers to evaluate new packaging as it will really look and/or perform, prior to committing to any sort of manufacturing process.

Even further upstream, however, consumer product companies (CPCs) intent on differentiation, higher quality, and shorter time-to-market are discovering the persuasive benefits of virtual design and testing of package concepts prior to physical prototyping. While digital mockups and physical comps both shorten the product development cycle and reduce time-to-market, electronic visualizations permit modifications to color, shape, graphics, and text without reference to a physical sample, especially when the time and money needed to create a physical prototype are in short supply.

Digital technologies enable designers to visualize the appearance and performance of a package as a still image or in 3D animation, permitting them to modify package design features and accurately predict the impact of those modifications. The benefits of engineering and manipulating a package in cyberspace can be very attractive for marketers who must choose among multiple designs, perform a virtual side-by-side analysis of a packaging concept with competitive designs, or visualize a packaging concept under specific lighting conditions, among other requirements.

“Product visualization enables the designer, brand owner, or converter to have more choices about what a package may turn out to be,” says Mark Vanover, VP, marketing for Esko-Graphics, whose flagship CAD program, Esko ArtiosCAD, currently controls a lion’s share of the folding carton, corrugated, and POP markets. The company further claims that its Esko Visualizer, the first product to result from Esko’s recent acquisition of Stonecube, LLC, is a key component in achieving complete, “product realistic” visualization on the desktop.

Aye, but where’s the rub?

From a design perspective, the creation of a package involves two distinct workflows representing structure and graphic design. “In order to design anything in 3D,” says Vanover, “you need to know what the geometry of the package is, and you need to understand how the graphics get placed on that geometry.” Until relatively recently, these two workflows were ran solo. The trade shop would receive structural (CAD) information, but would be concerned primarily with manipulating graphics. The converter would be concerned with designing and manufacturing a structure that performs correctly, and thereafter with making as many boxes as possible. Fair enough—in theory. “But what happens if the graphics guy doesn’t completely understand how the carton is going to be folded, and puts a UPC code underneath the flap?,” Vanover asks. “You don’t learn that until you at least get to the prototyping stage or even closer to manufacturing.”

Package manufacturing is about more than printing, folding, or converting, Vanover cautions. Rather, “It’s about putting that package on a manufacturing line that’s actually going to fill the box with a product that’s going to be consumed. There’s a long supply chain you have to worry about. If a commercial printer makes a mistake that results in a 48-hour delay in delivery of a brochure to the customer, it may not be a big deal. But if you’re printing labels and folding cartons, and you miss a deadline to get them to a manufacturing site or contract packager, you could shut down an entire company and incur losses for a product that amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Increasingly, sophisticated product visualization technologies have begun to blur the line between parallel structural and graphic design workflow, such that potential errors can be caught and corrected that much earlier in the process.

“You marry the graphics and the structure, give commands to fold it up, rotate it, and find out either that everything is how it’s supposed to be or it’s not,” Vanover explains. “Obviously, if you catch an error earlier in the process, there’s less likelihood of a bottleneck or mistake as you get to manufacturing.”

Strange bedfellows?

Product visualization, therefore, is about consummating that marriage of structure and graphics to the satisfaction of all the supply-chain partners before a product is manufactured. As in any good marriage, of course, communication is a fundamental requirement.

Given the need and the requirement to communicate both structure and graphics early on in the development cycle, however, Vanover points out that Esko has placed tools within ArtiosCAD that enable packaging engineers to begin to input some of those graphical elements and start communicating it to other supply-chain partners. For graphic designers who work in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, he says, “We’ve developed a plug-in to those products such that they also become package design tools. For example, now we have an Esko DeskPack plug in called 3-dX, which allows you to open up a window in Illustrator and view and design the folded sample in 3D.”

Esko Visualizer adds even more detail to the 3D renderings produced in Esko ArtiosCAD by communicating the type of material and/or decoration—embossing or debossing, foil stamping, etc., even the effect of certain lighting conditions on the proposed design—effects impossible to simulate on standard proofing devices. Good enough to dispense with the physical proof altogether? “That’s up to the individual requirements of the brand owner,” Vanover says. “I would assume that at some point you’re going to want to see a physical proof or a prototype, and there are companies that make prototypes exactly the way the product will be manufactured.”

On the other hand, he says, “There are a lot of people out there who aren’t in that business, and the proof you get off a proofing device won’t have all the required visual effects of the final product.” From that perspective, he says, “Esko Visualizer is much more powerful. The only difference between looking at a product in the Esko Visualizer and holding the actual box in your hand is the tactile sensation.”

Esko describes Esko Visualizer as a dynamic packaging visualizer that quickly creates moving, realistic, on-screen mock-ups of complex packaging designs—even with special finishes like spot UV varnish, foil block, and embossing—and displays them as a flat sheet, a diecut sheet, or folded, in a range of real-world lighting environments. Designers, brand owners, and packaging producers can communicate and evaluate the impact of the actual substrates, inks, and special finishes used for the final product early on in the design phase. Esko Visualizer combines graphic information in PDF and a variety of other formats with structural information—such as diecut shapes and folding lines, angles, and sequence—from Esko ArtiosCAD, interprets or adds information about substrates, special inks, and finishes, and delivers a variety of interactive 2D and 3D representations of the final product.

Not just for the movies

CPCs tend to be conservative about the adoption of new technologies, explains Robert Ziegler, president of Brandimation, LLC, developers of the Formview Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) system. “You saw 3D CAD emerge primarily for aircraft and automotive applications in the mid-1980s, with companies like Mercedes spending millions of dollars for 3D CAD systems. In that context, it was used primarily for part assembly visualization where you could see the structures—how and where one thing fit into another thing—but you weren’t worried about photorealistic or material qualities.” During the 90s, the same technology began to be applied to Hollywood special effects in the wholly visual world of movies like The Terminator, “where they don’t care whether the structure corresponds to any physical reality,” Ziegler says. “So now we have this engineering world, where we develop structures, and this Hollywood world, and along comes the desktop publishing revolution with the graphics people in the middle. Nobody has really tied all three things together.”

Because engineering has precious little to do with prepress and graphics, CAD and graphic design alone get you only so far in brand packaging, Ziegler argues. “The people in brand graphics have a completely different mindset from engineers. Whereas the engineer is trying to make sure the package can be manufactured on a line, the graphic designer is looking to create the most visually compelling story possible. What we’re trying to do with Formview is provide the tools that will enable people to bridge these different areas, talk to one another, and apply an aesthetic to the form/function equation.”

Brandimation’s Formview is said to be the first multi-tenancy, subscription-based online system to enable brand packagers to rapidly visualize, compare, share, and prototype packaging designs in photo-realistic 3D. High-resolution 2D and 3D outputs can be used instantly to replace product photography, enhance presentation content, and enable online consumer research. One-click ordering transforms virtual products into material comps and prototypes in 24 to 48 hours.

With Formview, Ziegler says, “engineers can give us a copy of their structural data. We’ll put that into our system, but after that, the graphics people aren’t manipulating structures at all. Instead, they’re manipulating all the visual parameters of that structure, enjoying all the benefits of access to structural data without actually having a CAD package.” According to Ziegler, Formview incorporates high-end 3D rendering technology to modify the visual elements of a given package, slashing the time needed for development, review, and analysis from weeks to hours.

Product visualization techniques have been shown to yield substantial cost savings by spotting potential design and print production problems early, optimizing material usage, reducing secondary packaging, or implementing package improvements designed to boost shelf appeal and profits. Packaging may be something of a Johnny-come-lately to the virtual feast, but it is rapidly becoming the life of the party. pP