BRAND YOURSELF! How To Print Your Own Custom Boxes

whether you're a brand a print shop or whatever the case may be if you're shipping products to customers having some sort of custom packaging is very important that package when it shows up on their doorstep that is their first visual their first impression of what you and your brand are all about so would you rather send your stuff in some blank cardboard box or send it in something like this i'd much rather go with something like this i'm gonna show you how easy it is to make it so to do this you do not need an entire screen printing operation like i've got going on here and in fact you could do this with the absolute bare minimum if you really wanted to you could do this with nothing but ink a squeegee and an exposed screen but in my opinion at the very least you should be using a cheap entry level single station screen printing press you're gonna get much cleaner much more consistent and much more professional results out of it and if you are starting from scratch i've created a little kit link down below for you to check out with everything that you're gonna need to do this on a pretty decent budget the first thing you need to do obviously is figure out what size of a box you need to ship your stuff in these are the boxes that we use to ship our merch orders in these are ten by eight by six and these cover probably eighty percent or more of the orders these will fit a hoodie and a couple shirts or a bunch of shirts and a few hats whatever these are probably the most universal sized box that i've found so far for shipping a lot of our stuff but we need to get a design on this bad boy and we need to figure out how big to make it so we need to measure all the printable surface areas of this box which would be the top and bottom flaps and of course the main front and side panels that you would see when it's all you know box shaped to do that you're going to need a ruler of some kind i've got a little t-square here this is absolutely perfect for this so we're going to quickly just measure our outer edges of the box obviously so we got 18 by 14 and a half but then we got to measure all the little individual panels which is a lot more difficult but an easy way to do that is to just take your box and give it a quick kind of pre-fold so it gives you some creases in the box and then lay it out and use those as guidelines to take your measurements from now we're going to take those measurements and use them to create a template in adobe illustrator you can use adobe illustrator you can use coreldraw you can use affinity whatever you decide to use this method will work as long as it's a vector-based graphic software just whatever you do please don't try to use canva stop using canva for stuff it is not designed software the amount of times a day i have to deal with that we're gonna open up adobe illustrator and we've already got an artboard set up to the outer dimensions of our box then we're gonna pull up the rectangle tool and we're gonna make rectangles the exact same size as the panels that we measured on the box and lay them out accordingly then we're gonna click and drag to highlight all the rectangles then right click and hit make guides now you can see we've got a nice little template set up here we can add a background layer to kind of look like a box and now we can just copy and paste our artwork in here and lay it out however we need to according to how we want to print on these panels the artwork side of this is definitely going to be the most difficult part of this whole process especially if you're a beginner so if you need to learn more about that stuff you're in luck because today's video is sponsored by skillshare skillshare is an online learning community filled with thousands of killer classes made by experts in their fields help you advance pretty much whatever skills that you want we're talking about vector design right now you can jump on skillshare and learn adobe illustrator coreldraw whichever software you wish to learn and it's only going to cost you 10 bucks a month and honestly that's how i learned pretty much the entire foundation of what i know now and since they're sponsoring today's video skillshare is giving away a free trial membership to the first 1 000 of you guys who join the community by using the link below so definitely check that out if you need to brush up on anything that i've talked about here now's the time all right now let's start getting to the fun stuff [Music] for your screen you're going to want to go with anywhere between a 280 to a 305 mesh because we're printing onto a somewhat harder surface that doesn't absorb a lot of ink and we don't want to lay too much down on there we're looking for just a nice thin crispy ink deposit so the higher the mesh count the less ink you're putting down and we're also going to be printing these with water-based ink which is pretty thin in general so again the higher mesh count is going to play in our favor there i'm using the 280 mesh screen here today normally i'd be using a 305 but my 305 mesh screens are all set up for another job right now and i'm not redoing all that so 280 will work just fine as i mentioned earlier we're going to be using water-based ink for this you can use any water-based screen printing ink but the ink of choice for me today is green galaxy pitch black we're using water-based ink for a couple of reasons the first one being that the water-based ink will actually kind of penetrate and bond to the cardboard whereas something like plastisol will kind of just lay down on top and we don't want this print scratching off getting damaged during shipping all that we want it to look good when it shows up to the customer and the other reason is for you people out there using the absolute minimal setup is this ink will actually air dry over time so you don't need to worry about having a dryer having a flash having a heat gun you don't even need to have a blow dryer in your house you can let this stuff sit for a while and it will eventually dry up and you'll be able to touch it you'll be able to ship it and have no issues before i start i always lay down a thin layer of fresh water-based adhesive on my pallet this isn't something that's absolutely necessary but it definitely helps when it comes to lining things up and keeping things in check as you print another thing before you start is to pick a spot on the pallet that's going to be easily repeatable to keep laying your box down so you can make tape lines you can make marker lines or to keep it even easier i just use the side and the front edge of the pallet and line the box up like that then when it comes to lining up your artwork to the box if you had done the design portion of it right this should be relatively easy and if you were extra smart during that step you would have added registration marks to the center of each of these things to make lining it up a lot easier but in this case this design spans pretty much the entire screen so i didn't have room to put them on there but this design and the box itself are both very straight and square so lining it up by eye really won't be that difficult [Music] so when you're printing these things give yourself a little bit off contact from the box you really don't need a whole lot somewhere between like a sixteenth of an inch to an eighth of an inch maximum is all you need then when it comes to the print you can use a push stroke or a pull stroke it really doesn't matter in this case whatever you're comfortable with normally when i'm printing clothing i use a pull stroke to give myself more control and get much more detail going on but when it comes to printing these things i've tested out both ways and it really doesn't make a difference so when i'm printing boxes i'll actually use a push stroke because it's much faster and you're moving in a more natural direction and you can really haul ass through these things and print a pile of them off in no time flat like that [Music] another couple things to keep in mind the first is that your boxes are gonna have a seam in them somewhere you can see that one right there be mindful of that when you do the whole push stroke pull stroke thing so because i'm pushing i've set up my artwork and pressing away so that when i'm pushing my squeegee it's gliding right over top of this seam no problems at all if i had it backwards i'd be pushing and catching into that seam and it'll be a pain in the ass so be mindful of that and the other thing is that if you're brand new to water-based ink and you've never used it before do not leave your screen open like this for any longer than say like 20-30 seconds if you're gonna walk away from your press for a bit just take it and flood it over and then walk away because this stuff dries out incredibly fast it's probably dried out in the time that i've sat here talking so let's just give it a little quick push stroke and yeah you can see it did not clear all the way but if that happens all you got to do is just flood it one more time and give it one more stroke it's really not going to hurt anything and that clears it right out now that you have your print laid down you've got to cure this thing and there's four ways to do that the first way is if you're a screen printer and have a whole setup like this going on the easiest and best way to do this just take this thing and run it through your dryer i don't do anything special at all here i run these things through at the exact same speed and temperature that i would use to cure a plastisol print on a t-shirt with they do come out of there a little bit curly but this is unavoidable no matter how you set this thing up because you're essentially quickly evaporating all the moisture out of that cardboard but once they sit for like half an hour or an hour they flatten out completely again and they're as good as new the other way to cure these things if you're a printer and don't have a conveyor dryer is with your flash but i'm gonna say make sure you're careful and pay close attention to this thing because flashes are really hot they're really dangerous and this is cardboard under there after all so this is a real quick way to burn your down if you're not paying attention the third way is to use a heat gun on this i don't have my heat gun in here right now and i don't feel like going out to the crush to get it but it's pretty self-explanatory turn the heat on and blast away and then the fourth way and the most time-consuming way is to let these things air dry and the easiest way to do that is to take your box and just open it up and place it on the floor and just come back periodically and check it give it a little finger dab and once it's not sticky anymore you're probably safe to print the other side well mine are all cured so let's put these bad boys over and finish them up when you're all done just scoop the remaining ink right back into the container then take your screen and scrub it and wash it out with some water let it dry put it back on the shelf and save it again for later [Music] that's how easy it is to start printing your own branded boxes if you're a company of some sort and you want to start stepping some things up this is definitely a route to take because these little details really add up and also if you're a beginner screen printer this is probably one of the top three easiest things to print so if you're pulling your hair out right now just getting started maybe check the boxes out because you'll be very surprised at how easy it actually is but that's gonna do it for this one if you guys got something out of this please do me a favor click that like button hit the subscribe if you haven't done so already and as always we'll see you again in the next one remember that [Music] you

Channel: Lee Stuart

Views: 222,559

Keywords: lee stuart, leestuart38, lee stuart 38, lee stewart, brand yourself, how to screen print, screen print boxes, how to print custom boxes, custom boxes, custom packaging, diy custom packaging, branded packaging, packaging design, screen printing tutorial, screen printing for beginners, packaging design tutorial, screen printing tips, screen printing at home, product packaging design, custom packaging boxes, custom boxes with logo, custom boxes for shipping, cheap custom boxes

Id: Y4oii26S3mQ

Length: 9min 59sec (599 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 03 2020