Packaging, 25 years. Structural design and prepress, mostly.
The tool I kept wanting: type the size, get a dieline. Not a template to stretch, the actual drawing for those dimensions. The annoying part is not drawing lines, it is the rules per structure: how the glue tab changes with board thickness, where the crease sits, how much bleed, how the dust flaps interact with the tuck. I have redone that math in Illustrator more times than I want to remember.
So I wrote it for myself and have been using it on live jobs for a couple of months. 21 structures now: tuck-end and mailer boxes, bags, stand-up pouches with a spout. Dimensions in mm or inches, vector PDF at 1:1, cut / crease / dimension / safe-area lines on separate layers so prepress can switch them.
Free, no signup to download. Accounts are only for saving and for read-only links to hand a printer.
Limits, honestly: no 3D preview, no PDF import of an existing die. Sizes follow common manufacturer specs and vary a few mm between die-makers, so check with yours before a run. If a structure is missing or the numbers disagree with your supplier, tell me which one and I will fix it. That is how the list gets built.
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[ 0.29 ms ] story [ 10.0 ms ] threadThe tool I kept wanting: type the size, get a dieline. Not a template to stretch, the actual drawing for those dimensions. The annoying part is not drawing lines, it is the rules per structure: how the glue tab changes with board thickness, where the crease sits, how much bleed, how the dust flaps interact with the tuck. I have redone that math in Illustrator more times than I want to remember.
So I wrote it for myself and have been using it on live jobs for a couple of months. 21 structures now: tuck-end and mailer boxes, bags, stand-up pouches with a spout. Dimensions in mm or inches, vector PDF at 1:1, cut / crease / dimension / safe-area lines on separate layers so prepress can switch them.
Free, no signup to download. Accounts are only for saving and for read-only links to hand a printer.
Limits, honestly: no 3D preview, no PDF import of an existing die. Sizes follow common manufacturer specs and vary a few mm between die-makers, so check with yours before a run. If a structure is missing or the numbers disagree with your supplier, tell me which one and I will fix it. That is how the list gets built.