How to Read a Dieline and Supply Print-Ready Artwork

A dieline is the flat blueprint of your box: every panel, fold, cut and glue tab drawn to scale before anything is printed. Getting artwork onto it correctly is the difference between a box that goes to press on the first submission and one that cycles through prepress three times.

Here is what each element on the drawing means and what your artwork has to do about it.

The lines on a dieline

Dielines use a consistent set of line types, usually on separate layers:

• Solid lines — cut. The blade goes all the way through here. Anything outside a cut line disappears.
• Dashed lines — crease (score). The board is compressed, not cut, so it folds cleanly. Artwork can cross a crease, but fine detail sitting on one will crack.
• Dotted or dash-dot lines — perforation. A partial cut for tear strips and shelf-ready packaging.
• Hatched or tinted areas — glue tabs. Adhesive goes here.
• Grey or ghosted areas — bleed zone. Artwork must extend into it; it will be trimmed away.

The dieline layer itself never prints. Keep it on its own layer, set to a spot colour with overprint on, and leave it untouched. Prepress uses it to register the cutting die against your artwork; if you move it, the box is cut in the wrong place.

Bleed: 3 mm, always

Cutting has a tolerance of about a millimetre. If your background colour stops exactly at the cut line and the blade lands a fraction outside it, you get a white sliver along the edge.

Extend every background, image and colour block 3 mm past every cut line. It gets trimmed off; that is the point.

Safe zone: keep text 5 mm from cuts and creases

The same tolerance applies inward. Anything important — text, logos, barcodes — should sit at least 5 mm inside the cut line, and at least 5 mm away from any crease.

Text that crosses a crease will look broken once the box is folded, because the board thickness introduces a physical step. A logo centred across a fold is the classic first-time mistake.

Grain direction

Board has a grain, like wood. Creases that run with the grain fold cleanly. Creases that run across it are more likely to crack, especially on heavy stock, dark solid colours and laminated surfaces.

You do not usually control this — we lay the blank out on the sheet — but it is why we sometimes ask to rotate a design, and why cracking on a dark-coloured folding carton is a structural issue rather than an ink issue.

Glue tabs must stay uncoated

This causes more failures in the field than any other prepress detail. Adhesive bonds to raw board, not to varnish or laminate film. If your coating runs over the glue tab, the seam pops open in transit.

We knock the coating out of the glue area as standard, but if you are supplying a fully imposed file, leave the glue tab clear of varnish, lamination and heavy ink coverage.

Barcodes

• Quiet zone: leave clear space either side of the symbol — roughly 10 times the narrowest bar width. Encroaching on it is the most common cause of scan failures.
• Colour: dark bars on a light background. Red bars are invisible to many scanners; white bars on dark backgrounds need to be reversed correctly, not simply inverted.
• Placement: never across a crease, never on a curved surface, never over a metallised or foiled area.
• Magnification: do not scale a barcode below 80% of nominal size.

We check symbol magnification, quiet zones and placement before plates are made on every retail product box we run, but supplying it correctly saves a round trip.

Colour setup

• Work in CMYK, not RGB. RGB files are converted automatically, and the conversion rarely flatters saturated blues and greens.
• Name spot colours exactly as the Pantone reference (for example PANTONE 2035 C), and do not duplicate the same spot under two names — each unique name becomes a separate plate.
• Set rich black for large areas (a common build is 60C 40M 40Y 100K) and plain 100K for small text, which avoids registration fringing.
• Images at 300 dpi at final size. A 300 dpi image scaled to 200% is a 150 dpi image.

File format checklist

Before you send artwork, confirm all of the following:

1. Print-ready PDF or native AI, one file per SKU
2. CMYK colour mode, spot colours correctly named
3. 3 mm bleed on every cut edge
4. Text at least 5 mm from cuts and creases
5. Fonts outlined or fully embedded
6. Images 300 dpi at placed size
7. Dieline on its own layer, unmodified, set to overprint
8. Glue tabs free of varnish and lamination
9. Barcode quiet zones intact
10. Any die-cut window drawn on the dieline layer, not as artwork

What happens after you submit

1. Preflight. We check the ten points above and flag anything that will not reproduce.
2. Digital proof. A PDF showing your artwork on the dieline, folded in 3D where useful. Check spelling, legal copy, barcode data and colour build here — this is your responsibility and the last cheap moment to change anything.
3. Physical proof (optional). Printed on the production stock. Worth it for colour-critical work and for any first order at volume.
4. Approval and production. Nothing is cut until you approve in writing.

If you do not have artwork yet

Ask for the dieline first. We supply a layered template for your exact box before any design work starts, so your designer builds onto the real structure instead of drawing a box and hoping it folds. It costs nothing and removes the most expensive category of packaging mistake.

Browse the full range of box formats to find the structure you need, or contact us with your product dimensions and we will send the dieline.