What a dieline is, and how to send artwork that actually prints

A dieline is your box unfolded and laid flat, drawn at exact size, with lines that tell the factory where to cut and where to crease. It looks like a strange snowflake. It’s the most important file in the whole job, because your artwork gets laid on top of it and everything that goes wrong in printing goes wrong here first.

The lines and what they mean

• Cut lines are where the blade goes through the board. Usually solid.
• Crease or fold lines are where the board gets pressed so it bends cleanly. Usually dashed. The board isn’t cut here, just bruised.
• Glue tabs are the flaps that get stuck down. Never print anything you care about on a glue tab, because glue doesn’t stick to ink reliably.
• Perforations are the dotted tear strips, for boxes people open by ripping rather than lifting.
• Bleed is extra artwork past the cut line, so a slight misalignment on the cutter doesn’t leave a white sliver on your edge.

Bleed and safe zones, in real numbers

Extend any artwork that touches an edge 1/8 inch past the cut line. Keep anything you need people to read 1/8 inch inside it, and give yourself 1/4 inch of clearance from any fold. Text sitting right on a crease gets cracked by the folding machine, and on dark ink that crack shows as a white line straight through your logo.

Cutting tolerance on corrugated is looser than people expect, often around 1/16 of an inch. If your design has a thin border running parallel to the edge, that border will look thicker on one side than the other on some boxes in the run. Not a defect, just physics. Either make the border chunky enough that the variation doesn’t read, or drop it.

Why we keep asking for a vector file

A logo saved as a 600 pixel PNG from your website looks fine on a screen and terrible at 8 inches wide on a box. Vector artwork (AI, EPS, PDF, or SVG) has no resolution, so it prints crisp at any size. If all you have is a raster file, we need it at 300 dpi at final print size, which for a logo across a 10 inch panel means 3000 pixels wide. Scaling up a small file doesn’t add detail, it just adds mush.

The color bit that catches people out

Screens are RGB and presses are CMYK, and CMYK can’t hit some of the colors your screen can. The usual casualties are bright orange, vivid green and anything neon. Convert to CMYK yourself so you get to see the shift and approve it, rather than being surprised by it on a proof. If your brand color has to be exact, ask for a Pantone spot color. It costs more and it’s worth it for a brand where the color is the brand.

Also worth knowing: the same ink looks different on kraft than on white board. Kraft is brown, and printing on it is a bit like painting on a paper bag. Colors go warmer and duller. That can be lovely, but it won’t match your website.

How to actually send artwork

1. Ask us for the dieline for your exact box size. It’s free and it takes a few hours.
2. Open it in Illustrator or Affinity. Put your artwork on a layer underneath the dieline layer.
3. Don’t move, rescale or redraw the dieline. It’s drawn at exact size for a reason.
4. Extend background colors and images 1/8 inch past every cut line.
5. Outline your fonts, or send the font files. Otherwise the text reflows into something else.
6. Export a PDF with the dieline layer left in, so we can check registration.

Get a head start

We publish free dielines for the common box styles. You can download one, print it at 100 percent on paper, and fold it up in about a minute. It’s a genuinely useful sanity check, because a box you can hold tells you things a screen never will, like whether your logo is on the panel people actually see first.

If none of this is your idea of a good evening, that’s fine. Design is free with every order. Send us your logo and tell us what you’re making, and we’ll build the artwork and send you a proof to approve.