Digital packaging design

Abstract : This paper makes a preliminary analysis of the general design flow of packaging design with the aid of digital technology. It gives a brief introduction to how to use digital technology to better assist design in all stages of the design process; The general design flow of product packaging design under the comprehensive assistance of the design software.

Packaging design is a comprehensive creative activity. Designers should use various methods and means to convey the information of the goods to consumers. It involves many factors such as natural, social, scientific and technological, humanistic, physiological, and psychological. If you want to quickly and accurately meet design goals, reduce costs, and increase the added value of your products, you must have strict and thorough knowledge. Design procedures and methods. With the development of science and technology and the progress of the times, new design methods are emerging. Traditional design procedures and methods can no longer meet current needs. It is necessary to establish a new set of design processes and scientific design methods.

With the passage of time, the human society has entered a new era—the e era or the digital era. The hand-painted design of product packaging has already withdrawn from the stage of history, and digital technology is gradually involved in all aspects of packaging design. At present, there are many professional design software for packaging design in the market, but basically none of them are systematic and comprehensive, and they are all realized in a certain aspect of packaging design. Such as: Harry Rohde's Harry Rohde management system in USA, ASI system developed by Advanced Software Company in USA, Pkg. software developed by Design Axis Company in USA, Founder Pack system in Founder of Beijing University and so on. Other relatively mature and widely used design softwares are also widely used by designers, such as: Core1DRAW, Photoshop, Illustrator, Freehand, 3DS MAX, AutoCAD, etc. They all served in the entire design process of packaging design. Different tasks, or they all have their own advantages and disadvantages, in the packaging design process, only a certain stage of the design of the package, a certain aspect of the auxiliary design. With the aid of these software systems, the product packaging design generally has the following design processes:

Design preparation

That is, the preparatory work before design, including design research, market analysis, data collection, design and positioning analysis, design concept, sketch design, and so on. This stage generally does not require the intervention of digital technology, mainly based on the designer's design experience and the level of design, but also the most important part of the packaging design.

Digitalization of design material

In order to facilitate design-time application of professional software for auxiliary design, the materials needed in the design process must be digitized before this. These materials include pictures or photographs that may be used on the packaging interface, technical descriptions of internal products, function display of products, corporate identity, and so on. For some existing digital data can be directly imported and used, such as product technical information, corporate identity, etc., do not need to repeat the digital input, and the work may be some of the file format conversion.

The devices commonly used here include scanners, digital cameras, digitizers, and the like. The scanner is mainly used for scanning and digitizing pictures and photos. The digital camera can directly digitize material objects. The digitizer is mainly used for digital input of some technical data and drawings.

Design

Modeling design is the design of the overall external shape of product packaging, is the appearance of the product packaging directly displayed to consumers, it is the key to the success of the design. At the stage of design preparation, designers should have a preliminary idea of ​​the appearance of the product packaging. In this case, it is only necessary to use the computer to create a modelling model. 3DS MAX is the most popular and most versatile 3D software on the market today. With its powerful modeling tools and Boolean operations, a series of editing tools can easily obtain packaging design models. In addition, the model object can be observed at any angle in 3D MAX, which is very helpful for the designer's design.

Structural design

The structural design is the structural design of the already-constructed package shape. It contains two aspects. The first is to design the container structure that generates the appearance; the other is to design some technical requirements between the package and the packaged product. , such as the shockproof structural design of the package.

The appearance of the generated structure design: First in the 3DS MAX will be three-dimensional grass model expansion, and expand the graphics for *.3DS file format output; then in AutoCAD, use / insert /. / 3Dstduio ... / command to 3DS MAX The .3DS file is inserted into the current document, and the two-dimensional graphics of each structural plane of the constructed 3DS MAX three-dimensional grass model are drawn by a dot-dot method; finally, the connection and fitting structure between the various structural surfaces are designed. This design Can be done directly in AutoCAD.

For designs such as shock-proof structures and other structures, it is necessary to design according to the materials used and the products to be packaged. The contents involved are numerous and will not be described in detail here.

interface design

The interface design is to design the packaging surface presented to the consumer. It includes text design, color design, graphic design, graphic layout and other aspects. On the one hand, there are many softwares that can be used currently. Designers also like to implement this part in the computer. Commonly used software is Coreldraw, Illustrator, Freehand, etc. If you need to use photos or existing pictures to use the "digitalization of design materials" phase of the digitized graphics files, then you may also need to use Photoshop software, because usually we are using Photos or pictures are not used directly, but are applied after a certain processing modification.

3D visualization generation

After the structural design and interface design have been completed, nobody can dare to say whether or not it can achieve the desired goal, because when the secondary element is converted to a three-dimensional element, the three-dimensional shape after molding is often unexpected due to changes in the deployment and fixed viewpoints. What is the visual effect of 2D graphics after they have been transformed into 3D? It is only known after the three-dimensional effect is formed.

Visualization generation: First, the structural design sketches in 3Dstduio MAX are processed and modified to achieve the effect of refined models; then, the interface design graphics are divided according to the structural planes, and each segmented graphic file is exported in bitmap format. And according to a certain law to save; third, the graphics file for each block 3Dstduio MAX paste material production; Fourth, use the secondary object texture editing command, the structure of each surface of the map material assigned to the corresponding structure of the surface, And adjust the parameters so that the visual effect is consistent with its design concept; Fifth, adjust the output view of the rendering, rendering output. Finally, the design of the output is evaluated. If it is not satisfied, it will be returned to the modification.

Drawing generation

After the design work is basically completed, if the design work does not need to be modified, the drawings can be exported. For the structural design floor plan, the two-dimensional graphics of the structural design can be improved by outputting it in AutoCAD. The main purpose is to complete the dimensioning and some local details. Planar renderings can be exported to the overall layout of the interface in Coreldraw, Illustrator, Freehand, often as a printing manuscript; 3D renderings are used to render 3D visualizations in 3DS MAX at the best angle, if necessary. Can go to Photoshop for further processing, and finally print out.

The development of computers has changed the development path of all walks of life. In the new century, the development of product packaging design is also inseparable from the cutting-edge technology of digital technology. The designers themselves are aware of this, and they are all working hard to explore how to integrate digital technology into packaging design. However, due to lack of experience and organizational and systematic research, most of them use digital technology. Based on their own interests and how much they mastered digital technology to assist their design, basically no more systematic design procedures have been formed. Therefore, it is very significant and necessary to discuss the design process of the packaging design of the auxiliary products for digital technology. The research and discussion on this point is mainly to find a more reasonable path, so that with the aid of digital technology, packaging design can complete the design task faster and better, thus saving time and improving design efficiency. It avoids some unnecessary duplication of work in the design process, so as to achieve cost reduction and achieve design goals quickly and efficiently.