Every custom box starts as a flat drawing. Before anything is printed, cut or folded, there is a dieline: a full-size outline of the package unfolded, showing exactly where the board gets cut and exactly where it bends. Get the dieline right and the rest of the job is straightforward. Get it wrong and you find out after the press run, which is the expensive moment to find out.
What the lines actually mean
Dielines use a small, near-universal set of conventions. Once you know them, any dieline from any supplier reads the same way.
| Line | Meaning | What happens on press |
|---|---|---|
| Solid | Cut | The blade cuts clean through the board |
| Dashed | Crease or score | The board is pressed, not cut, so it folds without cracking |
| Dotted | Perforation | A row of small cuts, for tear strips and shelf-ready trays |
| Shaded area | Glue tab | Adhesive is applied here, so nothing printed will be visible |
Those four cover most jobs. A dieline for a rigid box or a window carton will add a few more, and any supplier worth using labels them on the drawing rather than assuming you know.
Why the dieline comes before the artwork
A box is not a rectangle. It is five or six panels, plus flaps, plus tabs, and the flat shape of all that is rarely intuitive. A designer who lays out a front panel without the dieline underneath is guessing at where the fold lines land, and the guess is usually wrong by enough to matter.
Working the other way round is cheap. You get the flat template, drop artwork onto it as a layer, and you can see before anything is committed whether your logo is crossing a crease or your ingredient panel is running into a glue tab.
A dieline is a drawing, not a proof. It shows structure. A digital proof, which comes later, shows how the printed artwork falls across that structure. You want to see both before production.
The four mistakes that cause reprints
1. Artwork inside a glue tab
Anything printed in a glue area disappears under adhesive, and worse, ink can stop the glue bonding properly. Those panels are shaded on the dieline for exactly this reason. Keep design out of them entirely.
2. Critical detail sitting on a crease
A crease is a compressed line in the board. Ink sitting directly on it distorts when the box folds, and fine detail can crack along the fold. Logos, small type and barcodes all need to clear the crease line.
3. No bleed
Cutting has a tolerance. If a background colour stops exactly at the cut line, any drift shows as a white sliver along the edge. Extend artwork 3mm past every cut line so the tolerance has somewhere to go.
4. Barcodes placed without checking contrast
On kraft this is a real failure mode rather than a theoretical one. A dark bar on a brown substrate can lack the contrast a scanner needs. A barcode also needs its quiet zone, the clear margin either side, left genuinely clear. We place barcodes on a white knockout panel by default and tell you if your layout fights that.
What a usable dieline includes
- Every cut, crease, perforation and glue area, in the standard line conventions
- Panel labels, so you know which face is the front
- Interior dimensions called out, because that is what has to fit your product
- The dieline on its own named layer, separate from artwork
- A vector file, usually AI, PDF or EPS, at 100 percent scale
If a supplier sends a JPEG and calls it a dieline, it is not one. It has to be vector, at full size, with the structure on its own layer, or your designer cannot work against it.
Getting one
We draw the structure before we quote, because a price given before anyone has looked at the product is a price that changes later. Send your product dimensions and we return a free dieline, usually within 24 hours. It is yours to keep whether or not you order, and you can take it to any printer you like.