Illustrator Workshop

Making nets for packaging on Illustrator. 

Increase the size of the art board to fit the size of the net you want to use. 

Artboard tool - makes the art board resizable. You can drag, choose a preset or type in measurements at the top. 

Command+R - Show rulers. 

Right click on a ruler to change the unit of measurement.

Use art board tool to align the page to 0,0.

Guides - pull down or across from ruler to drag a guide into place. Or, double click on the ruler where you want the guide and it will create one. 

Holding shift whilst moving a guide means it will snap to the measurements on the ruler. 

Drag a box over the guide to select - drag it to move it or press backspace to delete it. 

View -> Guides -> Hide guides, lock guides or clear guides. 

View -> Guides -> Make guides (allows you to make a guide from an existing shape. 

Shape tool -> left click -> Input measurements for a more accurate shape

Click A for direct selection tool, drag over the points you want to make rounded and then pull the corners in. 

When making a box, you don't want black lines where all the folds are, also if you're cutting it not he laser cutter, it would cut the whole net up into small pieces. 

Select the whole net, copy it, lock the layer and hide it. 

Create new layer. 

Edit -> Paste in Place (this will paste it in the same place on the art board that you copied it from. 

Shape builder tool, the net must be already selected to use this tool. 

 When you hover over the shapes, they look filled in. If you drag from one shape to the next then it merges the shapes. So now there are no internal lines. 

Select a shape or line, click on the orange 'Stroke' at the top. You can alter the line to make it dashed, change the weight of the line and change the opacity to make them less noticeable. 

Add fold marks outside of the outline of the net so they won't be printed but you can use them as a guide for scoring and folding. 

Command+; - hide/show guides. 

Create new layer and place it below the net, this means your content will be separate to the outline of you net. Theres no problem with going outside the border, it will be cut down and its good to allow for imperfect cutting. 

Attempting a more complex net…

Add guides along relevant lines. Use guides to create shapes.

Delete the internal lines, just leaving the lines that need to be cut and the external marks to show where the fold lines should be. 

I feel more confident with Illustrator now, I think I just needed a refresher of the functions of the tools and I think I would now be able to use it to create a net confidently. I think I would move over to Photoshop to add the artwork onto the box because I have more confidence with this and I use Photoshop a lot to edit my analogue imagery. I think packaging will play a part in my final outcomes for this brief so this is a good skill to know. I now feel that even if it is only a simple shape that needs packaging, I can use a more interesting and complex net to make something more exciting than just a square box.