Update - PAC Worldwide "Build a Mailer"
Dave O'Neill found this site. Comes closest to doing what our Print Designer does.
I was looking for some inspiration for multi-sided printing and I stumbled upon these sites:
Packlane
- You can design and quote custom-sized, custom printed boxes, printed on all sides (three types of box). Mouse over the representative box types on the homepage and check out the sweet animation.
- They handle multi-side printing one side at a time; they pair a 3-D viewer with a design canvas in the lower right corner (took me a while to even notice that – it’s a little too out of the way). Mini-diagrams to select a side also help you understand which side of the box you’re working on. But there’s no apparent way to have art spill from one surface to another adjacent surface.
- There is a slider for quantity/price – interesting! Don’t know if I’ve seen that before. Theirs defaults to a mid-range quantity – an approach we might consider for our price/MOQ conundrum.
- You can choose different sizes, print settings, order quantity on the fly and see your pricing and lead time update dynamically.
Buildabox
Has kind of a tedious stepped configurator process to build your box. But once you get past number of colors, you land on a page that guides you through a decision about how many sides (panels) of the box you want to print on using diagrams of the deconstructed box (horizontal orientation) showing the printed sides as well as the folding flaps. Beyond that you don’t really get to design anything; there’s no art upload or design tools.
Lumi
- Sells corrugated boxes, polymailers, zip tops, tape and more. I didn’t find inspiration for multisided printing here - they do custom printing on many items (one-side only)– printing can be designed/quoted online for stock sizes, but if you want a custom size, with or without printing, I think you need to call. Nevertheless, I did take note of the following:
- While the site is contemporary, uncluttered and aesthetically pleasing I didn’t always find it to be intuitive. In some areas, it is a little too minimalist. To get to custom printing, filter by “Design Online” (at the bottom of the left navigation). Then click “Buy Now.” That progression seemed odd. At some point I was prompted to fill out a simple registration form; I think it was when I clicked Buy Now.
- Once you’re in their designer initial “Your Design” art on the bag serves as sort of a default to Quick Price quoting. Interesting idea. How to add my own art was not totally intuitive; I expected “Your Design” to be clickable and lead to art upload. I did eventually see the big honkin’ “Add artwork” button on the right but it escaped my attention at first.
- Like PackLane there is a slider for quantity/price. Seeing a trend here?
- They have a standard color picker and a button for picking PMS colors – for both ink and film. I liked this. (Packlane had the standard Windows-style “rainbow” color picker – I hate those.)
- They also have a slider for artwork size that handles width combined with height linearly – a novel approach that does nicely convey a fixed aspect ratio. (They also have input fields.) Unfortunately there’s no ability to click and drag artwork to resize move it – looks like you’re stuck with centered artwork.
- Once you’ve uploaded art you can’t add any more. You can only swap it or remove it. L
The Paperworker
Seemed to have the old-fashioned quoting process – fill out this form and we’ll get back to you. But they did have a tab within their product pages for downloading a template for designing the printing offline – “Just download the blank template and design offline in your favorite design editing software.” See attached PDF (also available in EPS) for a “premium corrugated box” – it contains simple line drawing, drawing with bleed /crease/cut lines and another drawing with measurement lines. Could be an interesting way to supplement our online offering ???
We definitely suck less than Buildabox, Lumi and Paperworker but Packlane may give us a run for our money. Good thing they don’t sell bags.
