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Packaging Design

Packaging Design with CAD Software: A Step-by-Step Guide

6 Aug 2024

Structural designers play a vital role in the packaging production workflow. They impact the entire packaging life cycle.

You must therefore equip them with the tools and solutions to work efficiently, effectively, and of course, creatively.
Enter structural design software. The right solution can make all the difference in a designer’s world.

So, let’s look at the path a piece of packaging follows, the considerations a structural designer must consider, and how a structural design solution/CAD design tool can make the process more successful.

1. Ideation: Making Space for Creative Thought

Before a piece of packaging takes shape, designers need great ideas to ensure it stands out from the shelf competition. In other words, it needs to ‘wow’! To supply the ‘wow factor’, the packaging must be:

Easily manufactured and assembled
Produced using environmentally sustainable processes and materials
Fit for purpose – protects the product inside from damage during transit and in the retail environment
Cost effective – made using the correct amount of materials with minimum waste
Compliant with all applicable regulations

With brands updating their packaging more regularly along with tighter turnaround times, the demand for creativity and logic from the structural designer is greater than ever before.

This balance between originality and practicality; rules and imagination; brand expression and maximum efficiency, is what makes the structural designer’s job as challenging as it is interesting.

How CAD Design Software Helps

Creativity takes time – but it’s difficult to fully tap into your artistic energies with production pressures weighing you down.

With a structural design tool, designers can trust that the metrics will be taken care of, and they’ll be able to build a perfectly fitting package around any imported 3D product model.
Reducing pressure and time constraints allows designers to better focus on producing the exceptional designs that brand owners demand.

2.Design: Increasing Accuracy & Reducing Repetition

Welcome to the design stage, where creativity and hard work intersect. Want a complete guide to packaging design? Check out this blog.

Depending on the size of your operation, your structural designers will probably handle thousands of projects per year. Creating each from scratch, with customized designs and specifications, is needlessly repetitive without reusing prior design templates and assets.

Each design requires decisions which affect the remainder of the packaging life cycle, including material choice for aesthetics, stackability, transport, accessibility and functionality, and recyclability. These decisions need to be made quickly and efficiently.

But with time pressure (and even without it) inaccuracies will likely rear their ugly heads. Of course, errors introduced at this stage have a significant impact down the line.

So, whether your designer is working on a crisp packet, a box of high-end chocolates, or a blister pill packet – accuracy is paramount to the success of each project.

How CAD Design Software Helps

There is no need to design each piece of packaging or POS from scratch. Instead, designers can access an extensive library of resizable design templates, creating packaging and displays in seconds by choosing templates (including ECMA and FEFCO) for corrugated or folding packaging and POS.

For example, a single template can be automatically resized, creating thousands of basic parametric designs. And when a custom design is needed, the designer can turn it into a new, reusable template, saving hours of design time in the future.

With time, a core library of templates (or standards) results, enhancing quality and consistency throughout packaging and display production.

Achieving accuracy is easier, too, as designers use various automatic tools, such as alignment and snapping features, which provide graphical feedback that helps both experienced and newer users enhance productivity.
If a mistake occurs, structural designers can spot it before it makes it into production, let alone onto the shelf. Automatic checks analyze the design and highlight any quality issues, allowing designers to choose whether to accept the design or make amendments. Every designer completes the exact same set of checks – achieving a more consistent output, while reducing manual checking time and enhancing overall quality.

3.Sample-Making and Approvals: Simplifying and Streamlining

Creating physical samples and mock-ups by hand has always been a preliminary stage of structural design. While samples are beneficial to customers who want to see how a box will look and feel, all the minutiae of assembling are time consuming.

If several rounds of amendments are needed, your approval process will be long and arduous – certainly inconsistent with mounting pressure to get to market at superspeed.

How CAD Design Software Helps

Designers convert flat designs to 3D mock-ups at the click of a button. Here’s how it works:

They choose predesignated fold lines, see glue points at a glance, and can check how the design will look from all angles.
They use a slider tool to check how the box moves during assembly and disassembly – particularly useful in the case of crash-lock base cartons.
They easily share a specification report with the customer, complete with a 3D render.

Artwork panels can be highlighted on a new layer showing the customer where graphics and text will be placed. If revisions are needed, they can easily open the file, split panels into segments, add windows, extend folding tabs, alter radius corners, or make any other alterations required with a few mouse clicks.

Files are saved in a database and, once again, are used to generate the new virtual sample for the customer – all sans scissors.

4.Production Preparation: Optimizing and Reducing Waste

Once the design has been approved, it’s almost time to start manufacturing the packaging. But the structural designer isn’t quite finished. They must now manually work out how many designs they can fit on each sheet, adjusting the layout to find the version which produces the least waste.

Designers also optimize runnability on the die-cutting press, avoiding sub-optimal layouts that will cause it to run slower, wasting machine time and energy. This is even more important when designs are more complex.

How CAD Design Software Helps

Structural designers no longer have to piece together a jigsaw. Rather, they can automatically generate multiple sheet layouts and select the one that works best. Designers looking for the layout that has the least sheet waste can sort by this field. What’s more, the tool can also highlight near misses – whereby a small alteration to the design creates a more efficient layout, thereby reducing costs and/or waste.

5.Logistics: Making Planning Logical

By the time the packaging is printed and ready to be filled with product, transported, and placed on a shelf – it would appear the structural designer’s job is complete. However, it isn’t.

Decisions around how the product is packaged, contained in a shipping box, stacked on a pallet then onto a truck all have an impact on timelines, costs, and the probability of the product arriving safely in pristine condition.

Designers must ensure their packaging is strong and durable enough for transportation and stacking, and that the shape makes this possible. They also must account for the product being moved around (often less than delicately) and stored sideways or upside down on the truck or shelf.

They must calculate how many pieces fit on each pallet, optimizing space to minimize haulage and fuel costs, while considering the carbon footprint associated with transportation. Too much number crunching? We think so.

How CAD Design Software Helps

By integrating CAD and palletization software, logistics are improved by structural information.

Structural designers can switch seamlessly between packaging design and pallet schemes and back again, making alterations as they go. This also includes full palletization data and views in customer reports.

Structural designers can run a corrugated compression strength test of the final shipping load to determine the ideal board to use – protecting the final product from damage in transit.

6.Retail: Becoming Shelf Ready

It’s time for the packaged items to hit the shelves among their competitors – all vying for customer attention.

Of course, structural designers have ensured it has the ‘wow factor’ way back in the design stage.

But there are several other considerations relevant to those working in the retail environment.

First, designers are responsible for supplying detailed instructions to retail workers on the shop floor on how to assemble the POS displays which boost the visibility of the product.
They also need to guide the person restocking shelves on how to handle the packaging without damaging it.

How CAD Design Software Helps

With the right CAD software, structural designers can make the life of retail workers quite a bit easier.

Generating POS assembly instructions in a movie or image format is now rather simple. Designers virtually fold and assemble displays or packaging step-by-step, while the CAD software captures the actions and creates a clear and easy-to-follow set of instructions.
It’s also easy to create realistic images and videos to make restocking simpler.

7.Consumer: Making an Impact

Packaging goes through a lengthy lifecycle before it reaches the consumer. And though there’s plenty to deliberate at each stage to ensure the product, in its beautiful packaging, reaches the consumer exactly as the brand intended, this is arguably the most important of them all.

Having made it off the store shelf, the consumer is in a position to decide if the product is something they’d buy again, recommend to a friend, or take the time to recommend on an online platform.

Recent trends see YouTubers and influencers in the thousands posting videos of the ‘unboxing’ of products, and commenting on the finish, feel and functionality of the packaging. Does it feel flimsy, luxurious, sturdy, etc.?

They address how the packaging opens and reseals, as well as how easy it is to access the product inside. Of course, all of this is important to every consumer (with or without a YouTube following). But, with packaging today being given such a vast platform, there’s more pressure on structural designers to impress.

Aside from looking and feeling great – the packaging must also have a safe and inclusive design, particularly for pharmaceuticals.

How CAD Design Software Helps

3D visualization tools make it easier for structural designers to not only ensure their work looks great on the shelf, but also in the customer’s hand. Now designers can be confident creating attractive and inclusive packaging.

8.Recycling Bin: Designing for Reuse, Material Reduction and Recyclability

The demand for sustainable packaging is ever increasing. Selecting recyclable materials, limiting use of plastic, and even creating packaging attractive enough to be repurposed, is gaining importance across industries.

Creating packaging using only the necessary materials and avoiding plastics, all while ensuring the product arrives with the consumer in pristine condition, is no easy task. But it is one structural designers face daily.

How CAD Design Software Helps

Structural designers can quickly and easily import CAD files of a product which needs to be packaged – before automating the creation of the outer box. They also automate the creation of spacers, foam inserts, and other protective materials which secure the package, allowing them to make decisions to ‘right size’ or downsize the packaging to use less materials – without jeopardizing its integrity, functionality and strength.

Concluding Thoughts

It’s clear that many decisions – which are vital to your workflows, to the success of each project, and to consumer satisfaction – fall on the shoulders of structural designers. Hiring skilled designers is therefore paramount. But so is reducing pressure at each stage, streamlining processes, and ensuring efficiency.

The answer is CAD software. It helps designers be more productive by reducing time spent on repetitive tasks and speeding up design time. It also allows them to focus on producing challenging designs. CAD software reduces costs, minimizes waste, and eliminates bottlenecks to help you become a more agile business.

Learn how ArtiosCAD can enhance your packaging design processes – get in touch today!