The difference between design and artwork.

As a freelance packaging designer there have been a few occasions where I have found that a client, especially one that is new to the scene, is unaware of the difference between a design and artwork. When asked if they would also like me to produce artwork for a particular design, they have relied with something along the lines of, “artwork?... can’t I just use the concept you are going to create?”

I know the design process can be a little confusing when you're not dealing with it on an everyday basis. With this blog, I would like to explain the differences between the two essential stages in creating a package for your product... the design or concept stage followed by the print ready artwork stage.

Stage 1 - Design for presentations

The design or concept is simply an image to show how your exciting new product will look once it has been printed onto the box, bottle or whatever form your final packaging will take. There may even be a number of concepts showing how the design looks in different package forms, flavours or sub brands. These designs are usually low resolution files, especially if there have been a vast number created before the final one is chosen. The most important thing to understand is that these design concepts are simply to get the idea across on how the end result will look... they are not good enough to send to the printer. Once Woolworths or Coles for example love the idea and gives the go ahead, that’s when the next stage begins and you can start talking to printers, photographers and getting artwork files for your product created.

Stage 2 - Print ready artwork

A file ready for the printer, also known in the design industry as ’finished art’, is a very important part of the design process, where all the many elements for a chosen design are worked up to a high level of detail. It all begins with a knifeline or dieline and this is usually supplied by your printer. The dieline is a fundamental part of the artwork process, a blueprint so to speak, so that everything goes in the right place at the right size. It is also at this stage that any professional photography is produced or If stock images are going to be used instead, they need to be purchased and downloaded in high resolution. One of the reasons why the artwork stage can be very labour intensive and quite often cost as much as the design stage, if not much more, is because this is when the fine art of retouching images in Adobe Photoshop is carried out. All image retouching for final print is produced in high resolution, 300 dpi (dots per inch) compared to only 150 dpi used in producing design files. A lot of care and detail, as well as creativity, is needed when retouching images in high resolution so that the final product looks clean and professional.

There are many other areas which could be explored also such as the purchasing of fonts, specifying PMS colours, copy, nutritional panels and barcodes. The main message to take home is that the artwork stage is a completely seperate stage and just as important as the initial design stage.