Create Luxury Candle Packaging - for Graphic Designers

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] In this class we're going to design packaging for our very own luxury candle step-by-step with me guiding you through the process. We'll take this from the very beginning in the planning stage and finding inspiration to modeling and conceptualizing your ideas in 3D and finally, imposing artwork on the guideline so that you're ready to print. The goal here is not only to provide you with a very impressive sample for your portfolio which this class will, but also to teach you plenty along the way about the process and workflow. If you're perhaps a graphic designer and you haven't delved into packaging design yet, you're looking to expand your skill set, this is a great place to start and I can highly recommend branching off into packaging design. Hey, my name is Jason Miller and I'm a freelance graphic designer based in London. Although I'm London based I've had the privilege of working for clients all across the globe, specialize in brand identity design and I've been doing this successfully as a freelancer for over 12 years now. All you need to follow this class are Adobe Illustrator or similar software and you definitely need Adobe Dimension CC. As we come to the 3D mark-up stage we're going to dive straight into using Adobe Dimension and I'll guide you through just what's needed to get this sample created and adjust your lighting, your layouts, and so on. If you'd like to take a more detailed look at using dimension and feel free to check out my other class which dives into a bit more detail. Now, you'll be given a few options if you want, you can design your own logo and label from scratch that we'll be able to use on our candle, or you're very welcome to use a template I provided as a starting point and customize that as much as you like. The real focus of this class is going to be providing you with something that looks impressive in your portfolio. Having fun learning something new along the way. I'm ready for this. When you're ready, let's get started. 2. Class Project: [MUSIC] Our class project, rather than just watch me create packaging for a luxury candle, you will learn so much more if you're able to follow along step-by-step and create your own unique version. If you're short on time, I'm providing some templates in the class resources, which you'll be able to use as a starting point. These fonts are live so you can customize them, pick your own brand name, and make some other adjustments to ensure this looks unique. There'll also be other elements you can tweak, such as the materials, the colors, the fonts to make sure your piece really reflects your taste and your style. That's it. Please feel free to create your own unique label, logo, anything you're able to bring to the table. If you have the time and you'd like to create a stronger logo as you can, but you're not sure how, feel free to pause this class and check out one of my other classes that takes you through specific logo design processes in more detail and then you can rejoin this class when you've created a logo that you're happy to use. Either way, I'm sure you're really going to enjoy working through and learning this packaging process. Let's get started in the first lesson. 3. Planning Finding Inspiration: As always, it's so important to appreciate the difference between finding inspiration and simply copying something. The latter, we never ever want to do as designers because it undermines the whole point of someone hiring us to create something unique for them. Now, the exception to that is this course where you're free to copy me as much as you'd like in order to learn along the way. Our goal here is to scope out what others have done, see which approaches may have worked for them, and come up with ideas that we can put our own spin and our own customization on. There's an expression, one good idea leads to another, and that's so true. Let's try to find some good ideas. How can we do this in a productive, constructive way? Well, here are some elements you can try to analyze as you look through examples. Why does this work so well? Which elements do you like about it? Are there techniques you could use in a different way? I'm sure I don't have to teach you where to find inspiration. You can find inspiration all around us. If you don't want to leave even your home or your office, you can of course just make a Google search and that's what we're going to have a look through. You could use Pinterest, you could use Behance. You'll find great examples any of those places. Of course, if you're happy to go on a little field trip, actually go to a store and look, particularly at boutique, beauty or luxury stores, have a look at what they actually choose to stock in that shop, and that can be really insightful as to what sells, what are the trends. That can be a really good way of finding inspiration for examples that work. Sometimes what will pull up when we do a search on social media or Google, it can just be what's ranked well with SEO, or keywords. Use the method you prefer, but I'm going to have a little look through here. We're going to just grab and single out anything that catches our eye. This is quite interesting. They've actually done a wrap. This would be a label I'm guessing that's wrapped around this votive, and they've used an animal print. That's a lot louder, the kind of thing I would often design, but that's interesting to see. This is something that looks very rich from the use of a champagne gold. It's got a little wax stamp on it. That's quite a unique touch. Probably a little bit beyond the scope of this class, but it's always something you could consider. This one's super minimalist. Remember, we're trying to analyze when we find something we like, what is it about it we like? On this one, I think it's for simplicity, simple texts, the left alignment is quite cool. Because there are so few elements, as if it's whispering to you and we have the DNG candle with the animal print is really screaming, look at me. Both work. It's good practice to look through a mixed range of examples like this, and just see what catches your eye, and try to analyze why it's caught your eye. I do quite like this as well. This is really nice. This is coming up big enough, so I'm sharing quite a large screen. If you're viewing this on an iPad, apologies if you're struggling to see some of the detail, but we're basically looking for examples and we want ideas, techniques, and elements that we might imitate. This one, I think having a label stuck onto the glass votive works really well, and they're giving that label a border. That's quite a nice touch, and everything is center aligned, just nice, and clean, and neat. That's quite a nice idea here. Logo type is sideways, the other text is upright. It's quite interesting. A label that's at a different orientation, that's really eye catching. Maybe it was something you'd love or hate, but that's quite interesting. They've got almost as if someone's deliberately smeared a paintbrush and it stretches from the top all the way down to the front face. That's quite interesting. Maybe in principle, if you have artwork elements you're using, can you carry them, not just on one face, but if you are printing on more than one side, can you use that to your advantage? Could you carry something across to make it feel more dynamic? That's quite a nice touch. I find myself attracted to just the simple type, especially where it's golden black. For me, it really screams luxury and it feels quite elegant. Let's have a look on Pinterest. That's a nice one. That's subtle variation there. For label, it's black but it's got a matte texture, and the votive itself is black, but it's like jet black with a more reflective texture. But just that subtle difference between the two is really, really nice touch. Maybe that's something to bear in mind, subtle differences, maybe just in texture. That's something you could certainly pull across when you come to your own version. This one, I'm drawn to as well. That's very nice. Coming up with a sticker that's gold with the detail of a text cut out of it, I really like that. That's actually a concept I've used in the past. I know that works well. Again, there's a technique. We wouldn't copy this. We wouldn't take the same typeface, do the same border. It's not about that, but to take an idea and think, wow, that's really cool. What happens if I put my own spin on this? You can see here, this is another version. It's a shame, it's a little low-res, but it looks like a textured gold. Already, when you're feeding yourself with good ideas, one idea spots another, and it lets your imagination start to build momentum. You start to think how you might use or improve things. Let's jump across to Behance. As you're doing this for yourself, grab and maybe save just right-click, Save Image, some examples or take a screenshot if you're on a tablet or a mobile. Just create a little collection maybe be inspiration, not to copy but to spark ideas that you can refer back to if you found yourself getting stuck. This is different. We've got our logo here, but they've used a pattern. They've actually not carried that pattern across all the phases of a box, but you get the idea. The packaging for a luxury logo can be quite a decorative, quite a detailed thing. They've done that here. That face isn't serving any practical purpose, it's just decorative. You can have a lot of fun. I like minimalism, but sometimes it's good fun to design something with a little more complexity and a little more detail, as long as it's done tastefully. Spend a little time. When you're feeling nice and inspired, and you've got some ideas that perhaps you might like to try out, join me in our next lesson where we'll select the packaging we're going to use. 4. Planning Selecting the Packaging: Now in a real-world project, one of the first things you will do when designing packaging is deciding on what type of packaging you're actually going to use. What kind of label will it have? Will it be printed directly onto the material? Will you stick something on. Will you use a wraparound or a little standalone sticker? Can you use transparent labels? Can you print directly onto the glass? Well, these are all possibilities, but in a real-world project, they often depend on the client's budget and sometimes the client's preferences. At times, you'll be asked to propose what you feel would work best, but most of the time, the client will have selected something and tell you what they're looking for. For this class, before we dive into generating ideas, it would be good to establish some boundaries and some constraints. That way, we know what we're designing and how much freedom we have. For the example I'll be creating in this class, I've deliberately picked options that I know I can mockup in Dimension without running into any speed bumps. If you came up with a really elaborate, unique box, you might struggle to find a model that's close enough to replicate that. Here's a reversion that we'll come to create in Adobe Dimension. I think it's got a good balance between simplicity and being complex enough that I can teach you some techniques for customizing this along the way. One portion of a box slides onto a base. In a tactile way, it feels very premium as well. That's an added dimension that, as graphic designers, if we're used to designing digital artwork, we're not always as aware of this, but not just for the way things look, but the way they feel is quite important in packaging design, choosing the materials and even type of packaging you'll use as is the case here, so this sliding box is a really strong choice. Then you can see for the votive next to it, it is a glass votive, but we'll paint it a matte black, will make for wax black as well so it's a nice uniform theme. Of course, you don't have to color it or use the same textures that I have. But in my example, there's also a champagne gold theme, maybe a gold theme that I'll use as well. I know exactly what I'll be using. If you can save out some examples, it could be that you just save and you indicate one of the examples you found. That's what you're planning to do. This here would be a black glass with a label attached to the front of it. While in this example, you can see there's I think a transparent label, which gives you a slightly different effect. Then it is actually possible to print directly onto the candle glass, which is a more premium technique. You could choose that. Of course, for the boxes, there are many different types of boxes you could choose from something simple, something with a little window that reveals what's inside to the sliding box that used. For both, we'll give ourselves the freedom to choose any color or finish we like, both for the glass and the card box and we'll be able to use full-color printing for the label. To throw in some more complex techniques that you might find useful, we'll even allow ourselves to use gold foiling for the box itself. 5. Understanding a Dieline: What is a dieline? Well, it has something that intends to be folded and assembled to be 3D. Looks before it's 3D when it's flat. If you imagine yourself completely opening and flattening an Amazon parcel, that is essentially for what a dieline looks, of course, because in most cases we can't 3D print packaging. It has to be designed in a flat format and later assembled and refine packaging does a really nice job on this blog post here of explaining what a dieline is with some examples. I like with the summary they've given in the packaging and printing weld. A dieline is a template that ensures that the design of a physical package is laid out correctly before going to production. It is a flat diagram with markings indicating wherever packages fold and cut lines are so that summarizes it really nicely. They've got some examples here where they show you the object mostly constructed, and then you have the deconstructed dieline on variety. The more you look at these, the more you'll start to figure out which portions translate to which. They also provide a really nice guideline to creating these in Illustrator, which we'll do ourselves later on in the class, but I'll share the link to this blog post because it might make useful further reading if you want to dive in a bit deeper. This is another website that I'll share a link too. This is diecuttemplates.com. They provide you with and you do have to pay to actually download for usable dieline. But they provide you with these pre-prepared for a very wide range of boxes and styles, some fairly complex ones. This is a useful resource. If you didn't want to create that from scratch yourself, you could just use one they've prepared for you here. I'm sure you can find other resources online where you're able to find the same. While we can create a simple flat label and adhere that to the front of the glass and votive for our candle glass, for the box, we want to do something, but it should look a little more premium by not sticking labels on, by actually printing directly onto the box that will have a higher-end field, but it means we have to create a blueprint of sorts for the printer to use. Now for this class, we'll actually work on conceptualizing and designing the individual elements, then working on them in 3D first and we'll circle back at the very end to building our dieline. Why work this way around? Shouldn't we start with a dieline first? Well, an advantage of starting with a dieline can be the precision you're able to work with. The ease of swapping things out and the fact that when the concept signed off, you don't have to go and begin constructing that from scratch. But for problem is it really takes experience to get your head around the waivers 2D elements are going to fold and come together. Because your client also likely doesn't have that experience, it can be hard for your client at looking at the 2D guideline, it really get an appreciation of a waiver concept, going to work in practice. I've found working with the individual pieces. Then testing things out in 3D can work better for both designer and the client. That's the workflow we're going to use in this class. We understand what a dieline is, we understand how we're going to use it. But for now, let's get started with our first element, which is a logo for our candle. 6. Preparing the Logo: [MUSIC] The first and perhaps the most important element, the focal point is the logo. Now really, this project is intended to both teach you a workflow, but also give you a strong piece to show off in your portfolio. So, you have a few options to choose from. One, you could either create or if you have some available, use one of your own sample logos. Two, you're welcome to use a sample logo that I've provided in the class resources. It's an AI file, so you'll be able to open it up and you can actually change the brand name. You'll need the correct fonts installed to do this, which are Lato and Trajan Pro. You can license for these both from Adobe Typekit. If you're using Adobe CC, you likely have that as part of your plan already. Option 3, you can create a very simple word mark logo simply by typing the brand name in your own favorite font. Or four, if you've got the time to spare and I highly recommend doing this if you haven't already, feel free to watch one of my other classes on logo design. Create a strong sample, then rejoin me here when you have that ready to use for this project. Assuming you're choosing either option 2 or 3, I'll guide you through that here in this lesson. If you're using one of the other options I mentioned, feel free to skip this lesson and start the next one. When you open up the sample logo file I've provided, this is what you should see. First of all, you may get a warning if you don't have the correct fonts installed. You want to install Lato, you need the thin and the light weights for this, and Trajan Pro 3. I'll include links to these at the bottom of the screen. With those fonts installed, you should be able to double-click and edit this text to enter your own brand name. Now, you may not need every version I've created here. On the third artboard, there's a version that's just plain white. You can't see that because it's shown on a white background, but if I put a background there you can see, it's sitting there with white text. The idea is to give yourself some flexibility. If you had just one version of a logo, then that dictates the options you'll be able to use on the packaging. I wanted to give you a version where you have a nice gold background, so it would effectively look like a gold sticker, and then you've got your text on top of it. You could actually use black text on top of this. If you select the type and you use a black swatch, and that could work just as well, especially if your candle packaging itself as mine will, has a black background. That would create the effect of almost a see-through element of a sticker. You get the point. You have some options here. This one, I've just colored a gold, but you're going to really make this shine and come to life with the effects you choose in Adobe Dimension. You could customize each one of these, but you'll probably struggle then to have the artwork match perfectly. Let's start with this version here. You may not have three lines. You may just have a strong brand name, so let's say ''Evoke''.. Especially if you have this big bold type, I quite like to mix that using a tagline that gives you a contrast underneath. It gives you a sense of scale. I think a nice, neat tagline tucked underneath is a good idea. Just be sure when you're finished, to zoom in, just tidy up the sizing, so that you have a nice crisp edge. Make sure that it looks good optically as well. Feel free to spend a little more time if you want, if you want to add some customization to it, and go for it. We're then going to delete what was here. Having copied, select it all, '''Command'' or ''Control C'' to copy, and then with the next artboard selected, ''Command'' or ''Control F'' to paste in front. That will give you the exact same positioning. We'll do that for this artboard, so I'm going to delete everything here, paste that in place. If I want to change this to white, select the text and use a white swatch. If you've opened my template, you'll have access to the swatches. You will have the standard colors and you've got a gold and even a gradient gold that I've created for the stickers that you can use here. Let's do this last one. Delete what's there, paste in place, and then let's select our gold swatch. There we have it. Do the same. Try to come up with a nice brand name. If you want to spend a little time making it your own, please feel free to do that, but this is a starting point you can use. If you don't want to use that template as a starting point, that's absolutely fine. You can come up with something yourself. But a few suggestions, I think for this luxury packaging, I found that really nice, classic looking serif works really well paired with something more modern and minimalist. I think the two compliment each other. Otherwise, you could try something that is just minimalist and modern through and through. If you're doing that, just be careful to balance for weights, if you've used a very light weight here. For this, I've used Lato hairline, then on the tagline, if I use hairline as well, well that's just too thin. Even in illustrator that's hard to read. When we export to PNG for the label, it's not going to render very well. You want to use a weight that compliments that. I wouldn't make the tagline bolder than the main text. To me that looks a little unbalanced. But if you choose something, if it makes the weights look similar or the same, or make sure the weight for your main brand name is bolder than the tagline. Just a few tips if you want to write something out yourself. But just use your favorite font for a tagline in there, if you are able to adjust the spacing. This would look really boring for tagline if it had default spacing. That's no good to me, that's a bit boring. Super extended spacing gives you a sense of presence and it looks quite elegant. Don't just use the default values. Experiment a little if you want. But by all means, pick your favorite fonts and see what you can come up with yourself. There's actually no need to export anything from here yet, but with your logos saved, join me in the next lesson where we'll put our labels together. 7. Preparing the Labels: [MUSIC] As with the logo itself, I've given you a starting point here with this AI file sample labels. Essentially again, we just need one of these options. This top row of the front-facing label, I would suggest using the same for the front of a box and the front of the candle votive. Over one of these in my example will be a sticker and the other will actually be printed onto the box. This still use live text. You could make your customizations here if you want. You can change the fragrance at the bottom. But I would suggest copying and pasting your chosen logo onto the artboards you want to use and just delete the artboards you don't want to use. But this is where if you do give yourself a few different versions when we come to Adobe Dimension, you'll be able to try out a number of options and see what works best. You may even want to create additional versions. To do that, if you open up the artboard tool which is Shift O, and hold Alt and drag to duplicate an artboard. With that duplicate, for example, if I wanted a version where we just have white text on a transparent background, I can select this, click the white swatch. There, I've now got that ready to export. Create different versions if you wish, until you have something you're happy with. You're free to deviate from this. This is just an example I've given you as a starting point. We have a simple key line that just ties in the fragrance at the bottom here, but you could really create anything you like. For the ingredients and a little our story label I've created, which I think is a nice touch, the brand in my sample is the ornate orchid. I've got this simple artwork with the opacity tone down to 40 percent, just two flowers from orchids to decorate this. I may or may not use that. If I didn't want them, I could just select and delete them away. We've got a web link at the bottom and just Latin placeholder text. But it will paint a more realistic sample of a wave is packaging might look. I think adding little touches like that. Here are the placeholders feel free to customize and tweak them. You can change the fonts, of course, change the colors, and you can duplicate to create as many variations as you like. Another factor is for the purpose of this demo, I've just eyeballed the sizes. I've literally just come up with something that I liked for the look in the proportions of. In a real-world project, you would carefully size each of these labels. For example, if I bring up the artboard tool again, Shift O, and I make sure I've got this label here selected. If you look over in the properties panel and appreciate if you're on a mobile device, this is going to look very small. But you have a width and a height value over in a two right boxes here. You can simply type in, let's say it was 2,000 pixels by 1,500 pixels, and that would size it accordingly. You can also type in other dimensions. You could do 20 cm by 30 cm. Illustrator will actually convert that for you into pixels depending on the resolution you're working out. In a real-world project, you'd plug in those sizes very carefully, and you'd also want to include a bleed on the edge of the artwork. If you don't know how you can do that by simply going to file document setup. Here you can add a bleed, three millimeters would be standard. Essentially what that means, it wouldn't be such a problem for a label like this was nothing to bleed off the edge. But for mislabeled, for example, it gives a little bit of freedom for the printer, so you would need to stretch your artwork overweight of that bleed. That way even though the printer is aiming to cut along this black line for this label, he's got a little bit of a margin for error. Just a little tip in case you were working on a real-world project. But for the purposes of this demo, when you are happy with some labels you've prepared, simply go to File, Export, and not Export for Screens, but Export As and you can use any filename you like, but you want to select Use Artboards and All. When you export that, you'll have some options, resolution, and anti-aliasing, as well as background color. I would make sure the background color is set to transparent. You'll want that for some of your labels. For anti-aliasing, I would definitely choose type optimized. For the resolution, dimension actually supports a maximum of 2,000 pixels longest width for any artwork you import. I found it works better to work at screen resolution and things actually appear sharper in dimension. Then if you sport huge artwork files and then dimension has to downscale them itself, which makes it run a little slower to. I would use the settings here and hit Okay when you're happy and save out your labels. 8. Background Elements: [MUSIC] First of all, you don't have to have any background elements. If you prefer, you can simply keep this clean and minimalist. But for this sample, I'm going to show you a few different options which we'll explore together. It's good practice to see how this could work if you need to use them. This is an artboard I've created and I'd suggest doing the same to lay out some background elements which you'd like to work with. You don't have to use vector files for this. Bitmap is absolutely fine, so you can use JPEGs, PNGs. As you can see here, I've collected a range of things, but I'd just like to experiment with, I'm perhaps going to use V's much more subtly. I don't think I'd use V's at full opacity. I might take v transparency down. If a color is not working, I can always change the color of a tone in Photoshop, maybe even use black and white or monotone. But for best place to find these would be from a stock website that you can't just grab elements off of Google, especially for a real-world project for a client. In fact, it could get you in big trouble. For a small cost of licensing a stock element, I highly recommend doing that. You can see some of the elements I've picked out came from Adobe stock. You should have access to that. You'll even have an account if you're using Adobe CC. I've searched for here Orchid on black because I know I want a black background for my box and my votive. Just have a look and see what's available, see what inspires you. Sometimes rather than just searching for gold stars, for example, I've searched for gold stars background. You'll see a big difference when you actually include reward background in a search. These tend to be graphics and elements that will blend a little more easily into your artwork for the purpose you intend them. Gold orchid on black would have some interesting results for me. You can see from this template design here, this is maybe a little too strong, but some useful elements you could play with. Something like this, where you've got this kind of hand-drawn gold leaf feel, this could look really premium. Something like this could work nicely as a background. Again, perhaps you want to pull the opacity back. It's not too strong. But elements like V's are perfect to give you some options and give you some freedom to experiment with your artwork. I wouldn't license any of these until you've tested them and you're sure you want to use them. You can see on my artboard here, some of these still have the Adobe Stock watermark. I've still got a reference number so that if I try one of these out and I like it, I can then go back and license it and swap it out. I would simply position them on artboards and then I tend to export my artboards so that I've got things nice and organized and all my backgrounds are in one one. That way if I need to license something and view details have been cut off, I can come back here and I'll be able to see in the document name on the top left. I can see exactly what the licensing number is. Try to prepare a few potential backgrounds you can use. You don't need as many as I have here. I've just tried to create a range to give you some ideas. We'll try some of these out in our next lesson, where we finally get to 3D modeling and finding a starting point for our artwork. 9. 3D Model Finding a Good Starting Point: [MUSIC] In this lesson, we want to open Adobe Dimension and find you a starting point. Find you models or assets that come as close as possible to the packaging you are hoping to create. They are both basic or included assets and also premium assets you can access in Adobe Dimension. The starter assets, and that's the default view you'll see, if you're in the design view and you have starter assets selected from the drop-down. Some of these basic shapes, like the cube and as we scroll a little further, one of the options I've used here is the pipe and that gives us a good enough starting point to model something and in fact, I'll show you an example here of a project I created, vis-a-vis rendered exports using both shapes, just using a simple cube and a pipe. Feel free to look through the starter assets, find the closest fit. But there is another way and if I scroll across my art board, you'll see the difference between the starter asset and something someone has modeled professionally and then uploaded to the Adobe Marketplace. This has a little bit of extra style, the bottom's a little bit narrower than the top of a votive. It actually has the wax inside as a separate element. It also has the wick inside as a separate element. There are some advantages to using a premium assets and I'll just move myself out of a way here so that as I scroll to the bottom of a starter assets, you can see where to access the extra contents. You've got a hyperlink here, browse Adobe Stock, and when you click on this, it comes up with a full 3D marketplace and these are all elements you can license and you can import in two dimension. If we search for candle. For example, you can see there's quite a range of models people have created, and here's the one that I've licensed. Feel free to have a look at that. See if there's something that more closely matches what you're hoping to create. If you have purchased the premium asset, that should actually appear in your library in the top left, where it says starter assets. If you instead click the drop-down and go to libraries, give it a few minutes to sync that to your account and you should actually find those assets in there. I'll share just a few tips to help you navigate around dimension in order to do this. From the pain we have undistorted assets. You do have filters. You could filter by model, by material which we'll come to, by lighting which will also come to and then by image. Under models, to drag a model onto our 3D Canvas, you literally do just that. You click, drag and release. You'll notice where our control handles for any selected object. You just left-click to select and there are free axis. The green is y, v red, pink is x, and the blue is z and the outermost arrow, each of these axis, if you click and drag, allows you to move along that axis. The circular control handle on either of the axis, if you click and drag, it allows you to rotate along that same axis and finally, the square control handle on either of these axis will allow you to scale along that axis. If you hold the Shift modifier key, then it will allow you to scale proportionately, which is useful. You can use Control or Command Z to undo. Undo the changes I made there, and we have an object selected if you hit Backspace, that will delete it. Something else you'll find useful when an object is selected. Over on the right-hand side here you've got a scene window. Each object is represented by a folder, and within that folder if it has different elements, you will find them there. For our votive here, we've got wax and I can actually toggle the visibility to hide those element, which is another way to see which element you're working with separately. We'll look in the next class changing their materials, and the colors of these assets. Another set of tools you'll need to get around the software are the camera tools. Your mouse swill allows you to zoom in and out, holding spacebar and then right-clicking and dragging allows you to pan around the canvas and simply right-clicking and dragging allows you to orbit for camera. Using those simple tools, the software is really intuitive. You can probably dive straight into it and start using it just given those few techniques, if you are someone that would like to learn a bit more about dimension before continuing, well, I do have another class where we take you through all of dimensions functionality, and how to use it with confidence. But for the purposes of this class, I'll focus on just sharing with you what we need to create this project specifically. So I've actually selected the models I'm going to use. You can see here, these were some of the options I found, just the plain starter cube, or there was this option for a sliding box, which is quite nice, and also this one which is my favorite and I've managed to adjust for scaling because I didn't quite like this where it was 50 50. I wanted a bit more space at the top to play with my artwork. To accomplish that, I simply selected the box, scaled the entire thing down, not proportionately to get the base and the ribbon in the position I wanted. Then looking in the folder, I selected just the top and scaled that up to the proportions I wanted. There, we've customized that model ready to be used. It depends on the model you've downloaded, but often if they have individual elements, you can scale those individually to customize it further. If I move across here, these are the final models I'll be using and they didn't come with these black and gold finish, so in the next lesson, I'll teach you how to customize the materials and to get the effect you're looking for. 10. 3D Model Setting Materials: [MUSIC] This is actually the starting point for the assets I've chosen, and if you just jumped in from the end of the last lesson, this looks far less impressive. In fact, it looks quite basic, so being aware of a flexibility you have to change for materials is quite important. You can use a really basic starting point, but you can very quickly start to make it look much more premium. First of all, I'm going to try to change the materials for our glass votive. Of a moment there's a bit of transparency. We have a separate element. If I select this for the wax, for wick, and the glass and I'm going to change the filter on my starter assets to materials. Again, there are actually premium materials that you can purchase, but I've found the starter assets for materials at least are more than sufficient. I'm going to use this matte finish for the glass, and then with that glass selected which I can either double-click. You can see here it says glass and we have a label Matte for the material that it's using. I'm going to under Properties, change my base color. I'm going to change that to something that's maybe an off black, a map black color. Quite like that. That's great. You can see I actually dragged and applied that material to everything, to the entire objects which I didn't want to do. I wanted to apply it to just one element. I'm going to double-click to select for wax. This time rather than dragging and dropping, I'm going to just click this wax material here, and you'll see that applies it to just for selected element of the object. I'm going to be changing that color anyway to again, an off black maybe something about their, I deselect to get rid of the outline, I can get a good look of the way that's coming together. The wick could be black, but let's do something a little more interesting. I'm going to select the wick and the material, well, it should really be, I guess a type of rope, isn't it? I'm just going to use cardboard and then color it with something as close to a champagne gold as I can get it. I think something about there, maybe a little lighter. That's it, that's nice. Now let's turn our attention to the box. I really like the preset texture that they have for this piece of ribbon here. I want to make sure I don't overwrite that. I'm going to carefully select the elements one by one, so I'll start with the top and I think again, use a matte finish for this. I'll click "Matte" and we'll use the same color. It keeps your recently used colors at the bottom here, which is quite useful. Now if I want to match this exactly on the bottom, rather than going through the same process again, I can simply select the bottom by either double-clicking it in the canvas or clicking it from here within the folder. If you use the I shortcut that will take you to the eyedropper tool and if you then click on the object you want to copy, it will not only copy the exact same finishing color, but it will create a link, and under the contextual actions here you can see the option now appears to Break Link to Material. What that means is until I break that link, whatever changes I make now to the color of a finish is going to apply those to both parts of the artwork. Undo that, change and I'll leave two materials linked. That can be quite handy if you have a whole range, let's say, of objects, and you want to link certain materials that can be really time-saving tip. I'm almost happy with this as a base. We could call this V, here's one I made earlier. I do just want to change that strap to a champagne color. I'll double-click this time to select it. This textile matte, I just want to change the base color and again, I can use the recent color I created. The gold there matches the champagne gold of the candle wick. I'll deselect, and that's it, we've changed the materials and that we're ready to start loading our artwork onto this. Let's do that together in the next lesson. 11. 3D Model Place the Graphics: [MUSIC] I'm starting this lesson by showing you what I hope to create. This is it. This is the finished version, which I think works really well. This is just the low res preview, by the way, as you're working, when you actually export and render something, it will fill in all the details. Don't panic if your artwork looks a little low-resolution as you're working in this preview view we'll come to rendering it later. How do we go about positioning our different labels that we created earlier and export it as PNGs onto our objects to achieve this? Well, let's go back to our starting point here that we'd reached from the end of the previous lesson. We have in materials and finishes set, and we now want to place the graphics on the objects. To do that, in much the same way as we change the materials, double-click the portion of these objects you want to work with. I've just selected the glass of my votive here. Under Actions, you want to look for this icon, Place Graphic or Modal. Click that, and navigate to the location you've exported your various labels. I'm going to use the label that has a field Gold background and the details reduced from it in black. Let's open that. You'll see that appears and you can click to drag and reposition that on the surface of the object. Now I'm going to move my camera so I'm in a better position to see this. Now you'll notice there's control handles around the edge of this and I'm going to use those to click drag while holding Shift to reduce the size to something I'm happier with. I think about there. That's looking good. I think that's the effect that I'm going for, for the votive. Then for the box itself, again, I'll double-click and we'll click on the Place Graphical Model action. Of course, your artwork may be different so you don't have to recreate this exactly as I'm. You're free to experiment and see what works. I'm going to use this version here. You'll notice this time when I place it, it's badly warped out of proportion and that's because we had made some changes to the dimensions of the original object. To alleviate that, I'm just going to click and Drag this control handle. This time without holding Shift and I'll keep going until the overall shape surrounding the control handles is as close to a perfect circle as I can get it. Unfortunately, there's no way to set the default scale here. You have to eyeball it. Now these are only intended as conceptual mock-ups anyway but it is annoying. I hope it's something dimension will update in future. I'm going to scale this proportionately now. We'll go to about that size there. Again, just eyeballing it. I want to position that centered on that face of a box. You can see peeking away there, there's a few versions I've created earlier that I'm going to run through with you to give you some ideas. Those are the front faces and you may be wondering how do I add another layer onto the same object. Again, we'll double-click and these here effectively work as layers. When I click under Actions to add another graphic. This time let's use the brand story and you can see that appears above the other graphic. You can drag and drop to change for layering. For this, it shouldn't matter because they're the same color and they're transparent. I'm going to drag this until it forms a circle, a position this on the correct face. I could leave it like that but because I've got these floral elements and there's a bit of a sharp edge to those, I actually want to position this, so those flowers they sit perfectly in the corner of the objects. This is going to take a little bit of nuancing but I think the effects will be worth it. Unfortunately, you can only scale from the center. You have to keep dragging and making little micro adjustments. But there we are without too much trouble. That's it. That's the effect we're looking for. When we come to render, of course, all this will show up nice and sharply. That's our story, that I've positioned on the right side face there. We'll just turn to the back and we're going to put ingredients on the back here. When you place artwork, it will tend to place it relative to the position your camera is facing. I've rotated around to the back, I'll double-click to make sure I've got this portion of the objects selected. It doesn't really matter what you have selected in the layers palette here, you just click, "Place graphical model" and this time we'll add the ingredients on the back. Again, drag the control handle to make these form a circle. I suppose really we should have this match the size of our board that we have on the next face here. Let's do that. May just have to fine tune it and try to make those look nice and consistent. It may just be a concept but details like this, I think made a difference between a feeling professional and looking a bit amateurish. Once you de-select, you can double-click to select again. We can go into the folder and then select the graphic you want regardless of where you're facing. You could rename these as well to help yourself. If you wanted, just double-click and you can type in a new name. It's going to nudge for ever so slightly. There we go. I'm happy with the way that looks. That's quite simple but I think really stunning. I'll show you a few other examples. Yes. That's what we set out to achieve. Interestingly, I use the white version of our story there. Of course, you may be wondering what about for backgrounds that we have prepared and in these samples here, I have dragged in background layers. This version I particularly like, I think this looks really stunning. It's got this subtle hand-drawn or kick pattern. I'll show you how to position this because it's a little different to the other graphics. If I move back across to my version here, which doesn't have a background graphic, I'm going to double-click to select the top part of a box. Use the same method as before to add a graphic. This time I'll navigate to my background elements and select for graphic I'm looking for. Again, we'll just turn this to a circle so that it's not being warped. Now at first this looks like a mess and I think that's due to the opacity being too high. Under Properties, as soon as we bring the opacity down to around 40. Now there's a sense of perspective and the background isn't battling for attention with the other elements. I'm going to drag that down to be the bottom layer, just above our finish, of course. You've got a choice of either. I could stretch and position this either, so it just sits on this one face. If I stretch it further, you will notice it will actually automatically start to reach around the other faces of the object but it tends to warp a little. The preferred method if I shrink this back, is under placement instead of decal to use film. I then got to do my scaling again. You'll notice it's set to repeat. As I scale this down, it will simply repeat the same pattern as many times as needed to cover every surface of a box, which is really useful. I'm simply going to scale, let's hold Shift to make it proportional. I'm just going to scale this until I'm happy with the way it looks. If it's scaled somewhere like there. I think the detail was fighting a little bit with my logo. Just want to scale it, something like that could be quite cool. But I think I settled something around there. If we look at the version, I spent quite a bit of time playing with that until I was happy. I really liked this version here. You can see I'd lower the opacity even further. On this one, the opacity is just 19, so it's a very subtle effect indeed. Now, this looks quite nice to have some contrasts between the base of a box being plain black and then having that pattern just on the top. But if you wanted that pattern on the bottom as well, unfortunately, the eyedropper tool can't copy graphics you've placed. We're going to double-click to select for base, add a new layer, and select our pattern. We'll just repeat the same process. We'll go to "Fill" it's set to repeat, will lower the opacity or work with it at 40 percent. Just so you can see this on the video and then again, I'm just going to move the control handle so that our scaling isn't warped. If you wanted, you could drag, and you could try to position this and scale this so that it matches up perfectly with the pattern above. I actually found this arrived at a size where you get the impression of a pattern flowing across both portions of a box. That works, I think really nicely. Let's just zoom across. Here's the other version I created earlier, and let's show you some of the other examples that can be created using the elements I've picked out. Here for he votive itself, we've got a far more minimal logo, so it contrasts a little with via the box has that key line around it. This we've just got for plain texts, so that looks quite nice. Here we have a very subtle background, some black roses, and the bottom portion of a box contrasts that this time we've also taken the attention away from our little ribbon and that ribbon is a subtle black. That was another option. This option here will look just at the box this time. This is abstract almost art deco pattern that we've used quite a loud background. Then we tried to place the label for the front on a gold sticker, so that creates quite a different impression. Maybe that's for you, maybe it's not. Then we have this version here. Again, maybe this is to your taste. Maybe you quite liked to use imagery to sell a concept. I prefer it a little more minimal. But this is an effect you could achieve and because we've got the layering and the transparency, it shows what you're able to do in dimension. You could have a logo actually overlapping and interacting with a background image behind. Another option, this time I've monotoned, just a simple image of an orchid and that's been placed behind the logo there. Bleeds around the corners a little, which just shows off the fact that we're able to print directly onto the entire surface of a box. Not just stick a label on. Hopefully, looking at some of those options, give you some ideas of what it's possible to create. But of course, please dive into this and using these techniques, see what you're able to create yourself using your own labels, and your own logo and your own artwork. Once you're happy with the way your model is looking, you're ready for the next lesson where we look at setting the scene surrounding our objects, at playing with a lighting and really getting this ready to render in high-res. 12. 3D Model Set the Scene and Camera: [MUSIC] Our goal in this lesson is to position the camera, set up the lighting, and even the background. Instead of something like this, which is nice but a little boring, we want to create something like this, which really has an extra dimension to it because of the lighting and the background. It's even possible to create something where we render a reflection, so we get the impression of maybe a glossy showroom floor. We can even render the gold portions so that they really pop and look like their gold. I'll show you how to do this step-by-step from our starting point here. If you bring up the version you're happy with of your object. The first thing we want to do is click anywhere on this background Canvas. You should then see under Properties, you have a background checkbox. I'll show you the way of recreating what I've done for my hero version of this. But you can feel free to play and experiment and do something different yourself. I'm going to change the background to a jet-black. Then still with a background selected, underground plane, which you want to ensure is toggled on, I'm going to bring up the reflection opacity to about 50 percent. At first you notice that seems to do nothing, it makes no difference. That's because for the more advanced effects that take up your processing power, you have to actually toggle a preview off or on if you want to see how that's looking. Up in the top right here we have Show Hide render preview. When you click that toggle, you'll probably start to hear my CPU fan come on as I do that. You can see it renders that reflection there. A reflection roughness, well that will affect how I guess clear, almost like looking in a mirror, or as I increase the roughness how diffused that reflection is. I've noticed the more it's diffused the longer it seems to take to render that preview. I'm going to leave it at about 9 percent for now, and I'll turn that preview off just [LAUGHTER] so you can hear me over the fan. Immediately that's made a big difference to this scene, it adds a bit of drama. But the lighting is a little basic. We've not changed it. This is just what you get out of a box. First of all I'm going to select my votive and just rotate it a little, and then rotate the box so that they're facing each other. I've got a more interesting position I can work with here. I think that's a nice angle that should show off everything nicely. I'm going to pan up so that we should get plenty of reflection in below. Now the lighting, if you click on the lighting filter under your starter assets, you have an environment light, which basically sets the makeshift theme that is sitting behind you behind the camera, and the objects interact with that. If I click on some of these examples here, you'll see that it will now render this as if it was sitting in this lighting situation. If I click on some of the more unusual ones, you see you could even have a colored stage behind you. You could make it look as if it was sitting out in a forest on a sunrise campsite, on a lake, all sorts of things. I just want to go for the studio panel's lights. Then I'm going to add directional lights so I'm able to manipulate further myself. To do that, if you click up under directional lights, the three-point light, that will straightaway drop in free lights, and they appear under your environments heading here on the scene. We have a key light, a fill light, and a back light. At first to get used to what these do, you can simply twirl the visibility off and on. Then I would suggest to turn one light on at a time, and play with it to understand what it does, and position it to achieve what you want it to. For my key light, this is going to be a fairly intense light that I'm going to, under Actions here, you've got this crosshair icon, who will actually let you point with this selected, Aim Light at Point. I'm going to click to have it hit this portion of my box. That creates quite a nice interesting shadow. I quite like that. But you can also manually change the rotation here, the properties, to see what this will do. Unlike the environment light, these directional lights, you'll notice they are actually capable of casting a shadow, one object to cast a shadow on another. You can also adjust for height if you like. You can see when it's lower I get a little bit of a shadow here in the candle. You could raise that up to remove that shadow, or perhaps you like it. I think I quite like to have that there. You can change the size of a light, and you can soften the edge. Again, you get just a quick idea of this in the quick preview, but if you turn on the render preview, you start to see with much more detail what that light is actually doing. You could make your changes with that render preview turned on. Every time you change your setting you'll notice it will refresh the preview. But as I've warned you, this really will test for power of your CPU. I tend to work with it off. I'm happy with the key light, so I'm now going to also activate the fill light, and the idea of this is usually to soften shadows. I don't really want to soften the shadows, I think they add quite a nice sense of drama here, so I'm going to lower the intensity right down. I'm going to rotate this until I see is hitting just the portions I want it to. Next, the backlight. Again, I quite like the drama without that being added. I'm going to lower that down. But I'll just check my render preview to see how that's coming together. I'm really liking that. I think that's definitely the effect that I'm looking for. When you've positioned your camera angle you're happy with, so for me that's the angle I want. You can save camera bookmarks, and then each of these bookmarks you'll have the option to render from that exact position, so you don't have to worry about coming back to it again, which is really useful. You'll find that here, there's a camera bookmarks icon. You just click the little plus. I'm going to call this Front. Then if I rotate round. We could have a view perhaps here, and call this side. Now something else you have the option to do, and I'm not sure it will work well in this scenario, but if you had for example an object that you wanted to fade away in the background, you can actually click under Environment, you've got Camera in your Scene. Under Camera, you can change the field of view if you wish. You can also use Focus. By twirling Focus on, clicking Set Focus Point, and then adjusting the blur amount. You'll notice that it will actually start to fade other objects as if you have a bouquet, a depth of field. If I turn on the render preview to better show you this. You can see now most of the focus is just on this very narrow central portion of a box, there, that logo. That might be an effect you want to create. In this case it's not what I want to do, but you do have that option. When you save a camera bookmark, it will save all of these settings on the camera focus. As soon as I go to my bookmark and click back on Front, you'll see that focus disappears and it goes back to exactly the camera settings that I had before. One last thing we're going to do before we're ready to actually render this out. That is to make the elements that I intend to have gold foiled actually render as gold in the app. We can do that if we double-click to select, or at least attempt to select the right graphic here. I can see it's actually grabbed the repeating pattern behind. I'm just going to click until I get the right one. There we are. I'm looking for my logo on the front face. Under Properties, you can see you have a roughness and a metallic slider. When you increase the metallic slider, I'm going to put that up to 90. That creates the impression of something that's very reflective and it takes on the properties of something metallic. The roughness is how mapped or glossy this is. Even if you increase the metallic all the way to 100, if our roughness is still high, it's still at 84, it just won't look reflective. As soon as I lower this down to make it more reflective, you notice that starts to, even in the quick preview, make quite a difference to the way this looks. If I deselect and I click Render Preview, you should see that's now really got a gold shimmer to it. In a high resolution render, that should come out and look really striking. You can repeat that method for any of the artwork that you want to be rendered with a metallic finish, which I'm going to do. Then when you are happy, join me in the next lesson where we'll render this together. 13. 3D Model Render your Project: These are the settings that I felt most happy with and I've actually placed a light so that it deliberately casts a bit of a shadow from the votive onto the box here. I quite liked that effect. I'm ready to render and this is a very simple stage. As long as you have your Camera Bookmarks saved out, you simply go to the Render tab up in the top-left, and there are just a few settings to choose from. First of all, you want to tick the Views use to render from. I don't need the Current View, I just want the bookmarks views that I had saved. You choose a Filename, the quality, I found medium is usually more than enough. Using the high-quality, it really can be quite slow depending on your canvas size and that's something I'll jump back just to mention. We go to Design. Your Canvas settings aren't set under Render, it's set here under the Properties. So you can't have the background selected. You have to click off the canvas, have nothing selected and here you can set your canvas size and your resolution. This is what will actually determine the output size of your final rendered artwork. You can plug that in here. It won't actually affect the artwork on the page, but it's going to affect the size of this renders up. I've found this is okay around 2,000 pixels at longest edge, and then 150 pixels per inch. That seems to be just fine for something you'd want to use in your portfolio. Going back to the Render tab, there's no need to export. This as a PSD. A PNG is just fine. You want to choose the location to save this to. When you are happy, select a folder and finally click Render. You'll see it will do two things, it will start to create a preview of its progress as it renders these with all the lighting and effects and you'll also see eventually an estimate of the time remaining. Depending on your canvas size on the machine you're using, this could take between, for me, it's estimating just a minute or so for each item here. But it could take 10 minutes, it could take an hour, depending on your machine and your canvas size. Once that's finished, you should have something like this that you can proudly show off in your portfolio and I'm really happy with the way these previews have come out. I've done a tighter shot there with a slight depth fulfilled. I thought that was quite nice actually to show off the relationship between the two items. View of it shows via the back, the brand story and the ingredients, and I actually couldn't decide whether to show a little bit more of a candle wick to shoot from higher up or lower down. Not sure which I prefer there. Also the lighting on the side, I thought maybe the hour story was a bit distracting and there where it shot with a little more mood and atmosphere. I quite like that. Either way, you've got freedom to play with the options, perhaps give yourself a few different versions to choose from. Remember, you will have to readjust the lighting each time you render. Although it can save out Camera Bookmarks, it can't save Lighting presets. To get around that, you could simply save a new dimension file. Set your lighting for one scene until you're happy with it. Save that maybe as version A, and then actually change your lighting and save a new dimension file. That would allow you to render with a few different lighting options to choose from. 14. Dieline Preparing or Creating: Let's assume you're almost at the finish line. You've created these stunning 3D Mockups, your client has picked their favorite. Maybe you've made some tweaks to the name of a fragrance, perhaps to some of the details on the ingredients. Everything is ready to be signed off and committed to print. Well, your flat label for the candle votive is simple enough. You just need to maybe add a bleed if it doesn't already have one, size of that, and send that to print. But unfortunately for our box, we can't just send our Adobe Dimension file to a printer. They won't be able to work with it. This is where we now need to circle back and create our dieline. Now, most often, a printer will actually provide a dieline for you. If you or your client have reached out to a printer, you've obtained the quote, you've agreed on the packaging you're going to create. Usually, it's in their best interest to provide you with a dieline so that you can adjust the artwork for the way they want to print. But there may be cases you actually need to obtain or create a dieline yourself. We're actually going to create our own version in this lesson so that you're fully prepared for any situation. We're going to base it on a template I've found, this is again from diecuttemplates.com. You can see in the preview here, this is a sliding box exactly as I want it to appear. If we scroll up to this sample dieline, if you're prepared to pay for them to create this for you, you just plug in the dimensions and you'll be able to download the dieline as a PDF with layers intact and you can start using them in illustrator. If you want to do that, you can simply jump ahead to the next lesson. We're actually going to create, not for all three portions of a box because there's actually some repetition here. If you look for lower bases are actually the same. We're going to focus on the techniques you need to do this for the top portion of a box, and then you can repeat that as needed for the rest of your artwork. We're going to start with a blank artboard in illustrator. Usually, you would carefully size this, so you'd pick an artboard size that reflects the overall size of your dieline, maybe with a little margin around the edge. Then under layers, we're going to create a layer. I'm going to label this guide. If I just drag in, just to show you what we're aiming to create. This is the preview we saw on that website. We're looking to create five faces, not six, because of course this will be the top portion of a box that slides on the base. It's just this left section we want to focus on here. We're going to create five faces. If we wanted this to be a perfect square, but that makes it even easier. Each face can be exactly the same size. We just need to add cutting marks of a flaps on the edge. Now again, this is where it's worth communicating with your printer because they may have a preference or suggestions as that how you work these flaps in. But we're just going to go buy this to create our template now. I'm going to start by using the rectangle tool. I'm going to eyeball this. I won't be using precise dimensions, but of course, you would, in doing this for a real-world project. You can see as I drag and I'm holding Shift to constrain this to a perfect square. You can see there's a little tooltip that pops up with the dimensions. For a moment, we're almost 60 by 60 millimeters. Instead of driving yourself mad trying to get that just right, if you drag it somewhere close, and then under properties and transform, you can actually plug your dimensions in here and we can make that 60 by 60 millimeters. Exactly. I'm going to give this an outline and make sure it has no fill. We'll pick a color that's most often used for cutting marks. We'll use a red. Then because each of our faces will be perfect squares, we can simply Alt drag. I want to make sure that intersects and overlaps precisely with a square next to it. We'll do the same to go up, make sure intersects, the same to go down. Each time I'm just selecting, Alt dragging. There now we have a base of our five faces. You could add a bleed if you wanted by adding three millimeters outside this. I'll show you a quick tip I would use to do that. I would select all of these shapes, copy them, paste them in front, use Pathfinder, to unite them all into a single shape. I can show you that's a single shape by just changing the fill temporarily. You can see it's a single shape made from all of our artwork and then to add three millimeters to this, we simply go to Object Path, and Offset Path. By offsetting that by three millimeters, there we are, that would give us our three-millimeter bleed. Click Okay. Remove the fill. Change the stroke color from the red that we use for cutting marks to say something like a purple. You'll notice we've still got a filled shape in the center. That's what happens when you offset a path. Which leaves your original inside, so we just select and delete that. There we have our faces. A bleed around the outside which interestingly wasn't included in this template. There was no bleed. But I think it's useful to remind yourself. You want to make sure any detail, any artwork bleeds across that area. Then the flaps are usually hidden because their folded and tucked. We don't have to worry about the bleed for the flaps. But now we'll add them on, in the end. It depends if you want to round these, you can see these have kind of got a slanted edge. You could do something like that. You could round them. We can do something similar. This is going to be super easy. But because our dimensions are the same, because it's perfect square faces, we just need to create one flap, we'll be able to copy this everywhere it needs to go. I'm just going to select everything and just drag it to sit a bit more centrally to give us space. I could always adjust for canvas size if I needed, that's not a problem. Now again, using the rectangle tool, I'm going to just drag making sure it overlaps with the anchor point. It doesn't have to be precise, but let's say we wanted 10 millimeter flaps. I'll drag over here, and then under 'Properties', let's just make sure that's exactly 10 millimeters. I'll zoom in, and we're going to first select the top-left anchor point, and just using the arrow key, we're going to nudge this to the right once, twice, three, four, five times. For the top-right anchor point, same selects it, one, two, three, four, five. That just gives us a nice little beveled shape to that flap, and there we go, that's a template for our flap. Now we're going to Alt drag. This is where it can be quite useful to have a preview as a guide, just to remind yourself where flaps will be needed. We're going to drag this wherever it is needed. We'll drag, and we'll just place a flat there and there. We'll select these three, we'll Alt drag, we'll select transform, the shortcut for which is E. Then, as long as we're outside these control handles, we can click, drag, and as soon as I hold Shift, it's going to snap at 45 degree increments. I want to rotate it 180 in total and drag it down into place. There we are, those are the majority of our flaps, we just need to do the two ends. I'll select one of these, Alt drag it, again transform, rotate, snap it 45, 90 degrees, drag that, and let that snap into place. Once more, drag this, transform, rotate, snap. Let's just make sure that's perfectly aligned, there it is. One last thing we'll need to do is change the color of these flaps, I probably should have done that before transforming and dragging them, but there we are. Let's select over flaps. We won't use yellow because that's very difficult to see on white, we'll use a blue for that. These are just guidelines anyway. There we have it. Now technically some of the lines that we've highlighted with a red color, some are cutting marks, but others are simply where this needs to be folded. While as long as the printer understands what to do, they don't really need that. Let's add that just to make sure this looks completely professional. Using the direct selection tool, the shortcut for which is A, I'm going to drag and select all the paths within that selection there. Then shift drag to select these paths too. I'm going to cut, to take those paths away, create a new layer, which we'll call Fold, and then use Control or Command F to paste those in place. Now because of the overlap, we actually have two of each path. If you want, you can select and delete, select delete, so that you just have one of each remaining. But selecting those paths, we want to go to Stroke and we're going to turn these to a dashed line. I'll use a free point dash for this. Lastly, let's change the color and let's use perhaps just a gray for this. Now we have dashed lines to indicate where the artwork is not going to be cut but just folded. We have a red line, although some of the flaps are overlapping that, so actually, let's grab these flaps, I'm just shift clicking. We may as well tidy this up, we'll cut those. Again, why not do another layer just to show flaps, and we'll Command Control B to paste that in behind. Now you can clearly see the red cutting mark the whole way around. Now if you've sized your artwork in Illustrator, that's usually enough of a printer to go by, but to be extra careful, it would be a good idea just to add labels with the dimensions. I am going to add yet another new layer. I'm going to call this dimensions, and then simply use the line tool. We want to drag 60 millimeter width. Under Stroke, I'm going to add arrowheads. Arrow seven is just perfect for this. Then we'll change the color of this to medium gray. We'll add text, and label this 60 millimeters, going to change that to a medium gray as well, so move that right right to our little arrow, select from both. We don't have to do this everywhere, but in just a few places, we can drag this just to indicate and to make it really clear to the printer that these are the dimensions we're working with. Again, remember while there are industry standards, there's a certain way printers expect this to be presented. Really the key here is communication. As long as you communicate what's needed, the printer's bear to help you and work with you to get the results you're looking for. Now we've really do have something that's clearly labeled, it's ready for us to put our artwork in place, and then, in a real life project, this would be sent to print. Now before we do that, if you're really struggling to get your head around and understand the way this dieline will fold and come together, and until you've worked with it a bit, that's not anything to be embarrassed about, it takes practice. I highly recommend physically printing it, cutting it out just with some scissors or a scalpel, and then trying to construct and assemble that together. Actually seeing that in front of you, comparing that to your artwork, it can really help you to bridge the gap in your understanding, if there is one. Until you become more familiar with the process, it can be good practice to do that, just to make sure you've not oriented something on the dieline the wrong way around. Now the printed area is usually the exterior, the outer facing portion of your packaging. Naturally that dictates the way it's going to fold or be glued. But on some more complex pieces, particularly if a dieline from a printer isn't labeled very clearly, it's always best to check with a printer. You could send them something like this, where you've simply labeled each face of a die alongside your mockup, so that you're indicating they match and just ask the printer to confirm. It's so much worth spending the extra time and getting that confirmation if you're in any way unsure or the dieline hasn't been labeled clearly. We're all set. Hopefully we understand how and where things are going to fold. Now we need to impose our artwork onto the dieline itself. 15. Dieline Imposing your Artwork: If you followed me through the last lesson, we actually created this dieline from scratch just for our artwork, which in this case is the top portion of our box. Perhaps you've found something online. Perhaps you can ask the printer to send one to you. But in either case, once you've received or you've created a dieline that you're ready to apply your artwork to, this is how we go about imposing it. You will need a few things ready to make this easier for yourself. Bring along your renders from Adobe Dimension because this is a really good reference point to remind you the outcome you are looking for. Then in Illustrator, you'll want not the exports, but the original versions of your labels and any background elements you've used. When you are ready with those items, the first thing we want to set is our background and we're going to lock all of the guide layers. We've got dimensions, fold, cutting guide, and flaps. We want to work just on this bottom layer here. The first thing I'm going to do is drag a shape that is essentially going to be our base, our background color. Because our box needs to have some artwork printed in regular ink against the black. We're not going to use a black box and then just print gold foil on. We're going to have the base of it behind the foiling printed from the dieline. You could actually open dimension and you could find the exact color that you used for the base. I know that the one I'm happy with is 33, 33, 33 RGB, which gives me a matte black. I'm going to copy paste in place and when finally rotate this so that it's perfectly overlapping with bleed and you can see there's no area where it's missing. If I did that and then the printer trimmed, and even a little bit of a white was stuck on there, then that would look horrible on the packaging. You want to make sure it goes all the way out to your bleed guideline and there we have the base. Now, because this is a top of a box, we're essentially going to fold this down and this face in the center here would be the very top of a box. I'm actually going to use this flap here at the bottom to be the front. I'm going to look at my preview again to remind myself. I think the first thing I'll try to position is our pattern. Let's get our pattern in place. I'll grab this from the background elements. Now, you'd have a few options here. If you'd use something like this image, you would of course using a version that you'd licensed, you'd simply paste in and you'd manually position this, to cover that face. Now, if you were happy to crop this and to simply have it end your bleed marks on that face, then that's quite easily done. If however you wanted a portion of it to just bend around onto the next face, that's a little more tricky. The method I'd recommend for that would be to duplicate this. I've just pasted on top, so we've now got essentially two copies of it. Use it as a guideline to crop this left portion and then do the same in reverse to crop the right-hand portion. That way you actually have the two separate elements of this image and you can rotate that into place on your next face. Problem is because we have to allow for a bleed, that's not going to be completely precise. The printer can't guarantee that the two portions, when they're trimmed, they're going to line up perfectly. Depending on the item of packaging and wherever certain folds and joins are going to go, you may actually want to avoid having artwork that's detailed that flows across faces. With a pattern you can usually get away with it. You'd certainly never want to do it with texts and even with an image like this, I recommend caution. That's just a little technique if you came across that with your artwork, otherwise keep it maybe to one face for simplicity, in my version vote, I need to take a background pattern. I have an expanded version of it here. I'm going to need to position this really to flow across the background of everything. I'm going to do that now. This may deviate a little. I'm not going to slice it into five different pieces. It may deviate a little from what we see in the concept here. But because it's so abstract, I'm happy that the concept is still going to work. I want to make sure I've got the bottom layer selected and we could do a new layer and here we could paste this pattern. That's come out absolutely huge so I'm going to zoom out, scale this down. I wanted to at least cover most of our artwork there. That's good. You could even leave it like this, but I think this looks a bit messy with so much of this overlapping. What you could do is once you're happy with the positioning, select it, cut it, select your base color, and you'll want to make sure your base is just one object. Mine was two objects, so I'm going to use the pathfinder and unite, and then over in the left here, on the drawing modes we're going to switch to draw inside. Finally, I'm going to paste that in place inside my base color. When I de-select, we have a much tidier, unnecessary but much tidier looking artwork on our dieline. Now, don't forget the locked layers. Ultimately they are not going to be printed. They're just there as references. This is actually what we have so far. We've got the base here, for our box. Again, this is where it's good to flick back and forth to your 3D model because you'll notice I need a quite a subtle finish for that background pattern. At the moment, this is really bright and really loud and it's showing in full color. I'm going to double-click to select my pattern and I want to lower the opacity. In my 3D mock-up, I was down to almost 20 percent. I'll see how that looks here. That to me looks maybe a little too faded. I'm going to go up to 30 percent, and I'm happy with that. I'll turn my guide layers back on. That's dealt immediately with something that can be quite tricky. It can be very off-putting if you've come up with a 3D mock-up like this and you're excited, you're ready to send this to print and you suddenly realize, well, we're not printing, we folds but link around the side. Instead we're printing with separate flaps that needs to fall together, which means perhaps you can't print across all of these faces. We'll suddenly realize why and an understanding of dielines and how this works that can save you. In my case here, because my pattern is so abstract, this is absolutely fine. I'm happy for this to fold together, that's going to work well. For a real life project, having experience with this and perhaps with difficulty it could cause if you had a more detailed background image, well, that experience helps you guide your clients. It's why sometimes you may avoid certain ideas because you know, it will cause you a headache when it comes to printing and production. You'll be pleased to know that was the hardest part. Now, we just need to position our labels in place. Now, there are two possibilities. One is that we're not using gold foiling, and I'll show you the method if that were the case first. With this layer selected, I'm going to go across, I'm going to select and grab the artwork for my front label here. I'm going to paste. Again, that's come out absolutely huge. Let's scale that down proportionately. Again, with a real-life project, you would be far more careful and precise. I can see from the little magenta guides will pop up here that's perfectly centered. I'll release that. Now, you could outline your type here, but I would highly recommend first getting the sign-off from your client on the dieline before you outline your type because if he needed to make any changes, if perhaps they changed their mind on the fragrance, we'd have to start dragging all your labels into position again. I would keep it live texts integral the absolute last moment. That there reflects the effect I'm looking to create on the front of this top face of a box. Next let's go to this face to rewrite our story. If you think about how this will fold from a dieline, we will need to use this face on the right here, but we need to orient the artwork so that the top of the artwork is facing the top, the center portion of a dieline. Again, I'll go to my labels, I'm going to select and copy. I'm expecting this to pace huge again, which is the case. I'll just scale this down to roughly the size I want and then we'll zoom back in. This is for one, I've got to orient. Ninety degrees to the side so that the top of the artwork is facing the top of a box. Actually, because this one was exported from the artboards where I'd cropped the details of this flower off. We've got a choice here. We could leave a little bit more negative space around the edge, or I could enlarge it and just have the flower bleed off the side. It depends, you have the option to choose what you think is best. I think the key is that there's equal space visually around the key line and the edge. Looking at the red cutting guide, I think that's where I want to place it. Visually, for me, that looks nice and comfortable, and balanced. What I'd suggest is grouping your artwork for this label, so I'll do that with command G. With that grouped, I'm going to just unlock this layer here where I know I've got this stroke for the dimension, and I'm going to shift-click. I've now got the artwork selected and the stroke. I'm going to click so that you can see that it's highlighted in magenta that's the selected object. Now, if I use the align tool, I can align vertically so that it lines up, and I know that's perfectly centered within that space. That's a little tip you could use. It's always worth making sure things are precisely aligned rather than eyeballing them. This is how our artwork is looking. We've got two of those faces ready, and now we're going to repeat that technique to place feed ingredients on the back. Let's go across to our labels, I'll grand this artboard for the ingredients. Again, I'm expecting this to be huge, so I'll just scale this down. Something I need to do for consistency, I'll just group the artwork. First of all, position it and make sure it's exactly the same size as this box we have on the right-hand face here. Otherwise, that's going to look very amateurish. They're the same size. I can now drag this roughly in place, going to rotate it so that the top of the artwork is nearest the top of a box so that when they fall down, that's correct. I'll use the same trick again to center this. Select the artwork, select that stroke, left-click to highlight that stroke, and use center. That was already centered nicely. Vertically, I don't have anything I can grab here. So what I'm going to do is create just a little rectangle for this purpose that expands the height of that face. Shift to select both that and the artwork. I'll click to make that rectangle the key object, and then I can click and align, and that did just shift slightly. It's a bit of a headache aligning things, but it's well worth getting that right rather than sending something to print and realizing it's not quite centered. I'm going to lock the dimensions again. Now, just to finish, some of you may have picked up on this, but there is a small mistake to our dieline. Now, over the printer could happily work with his artwork. We actually have the flaps are outlined in a separate color and our cutting marks. If it were sent to print like this will actually chop off our flaps, which is not what we want. Technically, some of these lines here, where they're just inside of a flap, they should actually be folding lines. That will be the final adjustment we make to this artwork. I'm glad I made this mistake because it's a good chance to show you how to work with this once you've put it all together. To make this adjustment, first of all, I will hide the artwork we've just imposed, so that's on the bottom two layers. Now, we can just see our dieline, which is still of course, positioned perfectly. We want to unlock our guide layer and our flaps layer. Using not the regular selection tool, but the direct selection tool, which will enable us to choose just one path at a time, we're going to click, and then shift-click, and select every one of the puffs that has a flap sitting outside of it. We're going to hit the eye key to bring up the eyedropper. We just want to click on this dotted line path, which will then copy the style to the lines we had selected. We now have the correct folding lines showing on this artwork. It's up to you, you could, I think for the printer's purposes, leave the flaps outlined like this in their own color, have been nothing wrong with that, or you could give the entire exterior the same red cutting line, and just remove the little blue line we still have on the interior of the flaps. I will do that by clicking to hide the guide layer. Again, using the direct selection tool, so you can bring that up here by clicking the A key. We just want to click and delete, and click and delete the inside puffs of each flap, which will open this up nicely. If you want to check if that matches up, you can twirl the guide layer back on just to see you've not missed anything. The last step will be to select all of the artwork on the flaps layer, and you can use the little area here clicking that will select all the artwork on the layer. We can change the color again by hitting eye for the eyedropper, and selecting a red puff from our guide layer. De-select, and we've now, as it should be, got a red cutting line which can be used for the entire exterior of the dye line, and our folding lines are now showing in the correct place. Now, for some printers, this really won't matter. They're going to work with the artwork you'd sent them anyway. But in case, let's say you were working with a particularly fake type of card, and maybe if a printer using their die cutter that was going to perforate some of the folding lines, and will score them in some way to make it easier to fold, will then having this laid out and having a distinction between folding lines, and the cutting line that would be essential. I'm glad we've come back to adjust and include this at the end. If we twirl on the visibility of our artwork, we can now see everything in place. Hopefully, the time we've spent looking at how to create a dieline, and just now even make a small adjustment to it for a certain printing scenario. Hopefully, this prepares you and it gives you an understanding of how your artwork would be sent to print. Now, I appreciate you for the class project is probably just the 3D mockup that you're looking forward to sharing and showing off in your portfolio. I'm going to include this Illustrator file for the dieline just so you can open it up, reverse engineer it, deconstruct it if you like, and hopefully learn something from playing with it yourself. Now, a last step will include before this would be theoretically ready to go, is indicating which portions of this artwork should be gold foiled. Now, if gold foiling was included, usually your printer wants to see something, certainly on a separate layer, and usually inked in a way that their machine will be able to pick it out from the rest of the artwork. Sometimes they'll ask you to place it in 100 percent magenta or 100 percent black. Now, you can see my document color mode is already set to CMYK, so over some transparency and blending going on this would all be output as a CMYK file. To indicate our artwork to be foiled, first of all, we're now going to outline the type, and also expand any strokes. To do that, I'll click this first group of artwork on this face here, and the shortcut to outline type is control or command shift and O, and you'll see the type is now lost its live effect and it's outlined. Next, we'll go to "Object" expand appearance, and will ensure we expand the fill and the stroke. Doing that gives us a single foreground color for all of the artwork we have selected. We're simply going to double-click in the color palette. We're going to change this under the CMYK values to 100 percent magenta and click "Okay". Finally, we'll cut, I'll create a new layer, and call this gold foiling and paste in front, with positions of our artwork exactly where it should be. Now, visually, this looks awful. We've caught something that's bright magenta in the middle of our artwork. But this is to indicate to the printer, this is the portion to be foiled. We simply repeat those steps. Then, just don't forget to cut and position that artwork on your new gold foiling layer. As a final check, if you twirl off the visibility, you can check what's going to print on the gold foiling plate, and what will be printed with regular ink. That covers quite a wide range of scenarios you could run into when wanting to prepare your artwork for print. But at least now, as well as being able to design something that looks stunning, you have an awareness of a process that takes place for actually getting this artwork to print as you intend them. 16. Conclusion & Thanks for Watching: [MUSIC] Well done and thank you for watching this class. I hope you've enjoyed following it as much as I've enjoyed sharing this with you. I can't wait to see what you've been able to come up with. Please be sure to upload your creations in the class projects area. Thanks again for joining me. I really appreciate it. Please leave a review if you've enjoyed the class and if you haven't already, be sure to follow my profile so that hopefully I can see you in the next one. [MUSIC]