#eclipse from South Mission Beach in San Diego

I’ve had the pleasure of working with Lucy, Charlie, the staff and all the pet dogs at  The Honest Kitchen for several years. They were no longer just a startup,  so they knew what they wanted in packaging but just didn’t have it finessed quite yet.

Working with their team and their designer, Jen Cadam, we evolved from printing 4 color process on SBS board just simulating a kraft background, to printing directly on kraftpak. We print using one hit of white ink, 4 color process and custom spot colors for each diet. All vegetable based inks are used, which is important to The Honest Kitchen. Kraftpak is a virgin fiber board and the corrugated is recycled. Once assembled, the entire box is easily recyclable.

We did press proofs to determine which screen values of the spot colors would work for the desired look. The designer also had the four color food imagery specifically refined for printing on kraftpak. Once the top sheet of kraftpak is printed, we laminate it to single face E Flute for a beautiful litho lam product.

Finally after several years of working together as partners, The Honest Kitchen has the kraft boxes they’ve dreamed of and we’ve gained expertise in printing on kraftpak.

So you’ve designed the folding cartons for your retail product. Now you’ve got to design the corrugated shipper! You’ve got a new set of rules when printing on corrugated.

Designing for print on this substrate is a a bit different compared to designing for print on SBS or other paperboard. The fibers and formation of corrugated are much less refined than SBS. The print surface is mottled as well as warped occasionally! But the beauty of corrugated is that it’s strong and it protects your product. You just have to design around these parameters for success.

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Direct printing on corrugated is typically achieved using flexography. The printing plates are made of rubber - basically it’s a giant rubber stamp! Direct printing on corrugated is traditionally not a place for fine lines and detail. Plan for “bounce” when printing multiple colors. Here’s an example where the designer used multiple colors but allowed for bounce by giving plenty of overlap between colors.

Although my blog posts transfer here to tumblr, the full view is at packagingchic.com!

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How about getting a lunch box full of your favorite Bare Escentuals cosmetics?! One of the sets is available at Nordstrom now! The material makeup of this box is actually a litho lam box: it’s printed on 12 point SBS first and then laminated to single face corrugate. This type of folding carton gives you extra strength but allows you to print and foil on the higher quality SBS board. Totally chic and re-usable!

A while back, I wrote about the redesign of Uinta Brewing’s 12 pack litho lam boxes. Here are some of their case shippers.

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You’ll notice the typography and graphics are related, but with corrugated print parameters in mind.

I wanted to highlight these boxes for the production steps they use. First, these are printed 4 color plus one pantone (luminous beige) and one color on the inside - all in one pass on press. The finishing techniques are what set this carton apart from the rest in their segment. These have a textured emboss on 3 sides, top and bottom, a regular flat emboss and foil stamping. The textured emboss is part of the rich patterned background you see here. The charbronze line and the banner area are the regular flat emboss. The foil stamping around the banner registers so well to the printing and the two embossing areas are in register every time. These cartons use almost every machine at UPB! On repeat orders, we turn these around in about 4 weeks during normal schedule times.

Loving this company Dress my Cupcake. I met them at the Fancy Food Show last month. Standard designs are available but you can also do custom! Regular, Mini and even Jumbo sizes too. They even have reusable and metallics. Need to start baking cupcakes just to be able to use these!

Sometimes - ok most of the time - when I’m out shopping, I am drawn to the packaging. The Art of Shaving store at the Mandalay Bay shops in Las Vegas has all their products on display. They do a good job of color coding the different lines. Unfortunately, seeing the packaging up close I thought the quality was not as high as I had thought from a distance … Paul is a “retired” designer and loved chatting about their packaging. He was only humoring me trying to get a sale but in the end, we didn’t buy anything. 

These litho lam style boxes for Uinta Brewing are designed by Tenfold Collective from Boulder, CO. Uinta is  a Salt Lake City brewery with a great pub onsite. Tenfold recently revamped the entire branding at Uinta.

Litho laminated boxes (litho lam) have a top sheet of SBS printed and then laminated to a sheet of single faced corrugated. It’s a little more industrial than a typical folding carton and a lot more fancy than a straight up corrugated box. Today, when you shop at any large retail store, you’ll see how important litho lam boxes have become. It has the best of both worlds: high quality printing to attract the shopper and a very good strength to weight ratio to protect the product.

Hope you weren’t wondering why I’d have photos of the Fancy Food Show here. Lots of current and future packaging clients display here or walk the show. This is where ideas and plans begin for this industry!

Cheese! Olives! At the Winter Fancy Food Show 2012