In the past, the main function of corrugated boxes was as a transport package, and the surface printing was also very simple. The reason: first, the carton factory and users do not attach importance to the design of corrugated carton packaging, only use the carton as a tool for protecting and containing products; second, the flatness of the corrugated carton surface is relatively poor, and it is difficult to print beautiful patterns; The previous printing plates were all hand-engraved plates, and it was impossible to reproduce fine lines and dots. Of course, there are also reasons such as insufficient number of printing units, which have restricted the rapid development of carton printing.

In recent years, with the rapid economic development and increasing exchanges with foreign countries, people have increasingly recognized the importance of packaging and decoration, especially the influx of international supermarkets such as Wal-Mart and Carrefour and the increasing number of domestic supermarkets People have changed the traditional shopping habits, and at the same time, the sales function of corrugated cartons has become increasingly prominent. Users have begun to pay more and more attention to the outermost packaging that displays products and company images. At the same time, the widespread application of flexographic plates (photosensitive resin plates) and the rise of flexo prepress technology also gave strong support to carton printing.

In the field of packaging design, the past color packaging or exquisite packaging design is mostly realized by offset printing and gravure printing. As offset printing and gravure printing are mature printing methods, there are still many printing suitability that designers need to pay attention to in packaging design. As a new printing method, flexo printing requires a designer ’s Learn more about the characteristics of flexo printing. Designers must pay attention to the following points during the prepress design of direct flexo printing of corrugated boxes.

1. Clearly express the creative color number

Thousands of worlds, colorful, especially the eyes of the designer, are good at discovering beautiful colors and organizing them organically, creating all kinds of elegant, bold, warm, or strong visual impact works. As a packaging design, the ultimate goal is to achieve their own creative effects after printing, and to achieve industrial production. Therefore, for the packaging design of direct flexo printing of corrugated boxes, in terms of color application, you must first understand that your creativity is realized on several color printing machines, and make sure that your creativity is expressed in several colors. The number of domestic corrugated box flexo printing machine units generally varies from 2, 3, 4, and 6. Before confirming the use of several colors, on the one hand, the number of color groups of the printing machine must be considered, on the other hand, the process must consider whether to use white ink or varnish, so as to finally determine the number of colors that can be used to express creativity.

Of course, under the premise of fully expressing the design creativity, the number of printing colors should be reduced as much as possible, which is beneficial to printing operations, quality control, and cost control during mass production.

In addition, there are many manufacturers who want to use as many spot colors as possible to achieve the uniform color of each batch of products and play a certain role in anti-counterfeiting. Therefore, in addition to the traditional CMYK4 color in the design of its packaging, spot color inks are used more. However, in actual operation, due to the limitations of the printing press, manuscripts that need to be printed on the four-color machine cannot be expressed in any of the four colors during color separation. Finally, they have to communicate with the designer to merge similar colors into one color Or make changes to the designer's work.

Because flexo printing transfers ink through the anilox roller, the line number of the anilox roller determines the amount of ink transfer and the fineness of printing. Generally, the high-line-count anilox roller is used for screen adjustment, so that the dot printing is clear; and the low-line-number anilox roller is used for the field version to achieve color saturation. When there are both mesh-tone images and solid ground in one color, and they are visually prominent, the color is generally divided into mesh-tone version and solid-field version to make plates separately during color separation to facilitate printing operations. Therefore, when considering the overall color number in the design process, you must not ignore the feature of color separation in flexo printing.

In addition, in practice, this situation is often encountered, that is, many corrugated box printing machines are three-color machines, which cannot achieve normal four-color printing. Therefore, in the process of colorizing the watermark of the corrugated box, three colors are often used. Reproduce the four-color manuscript. When using three-color overprint to produce black, the following two practical situations need to be considered:

(1) The color deviation of the ink causes non-standard black in three-color overprinting;

(2) Three-color overprinting will make the ink layer too thick, affecting the printing quality and effect.

In view of the above two situations, when dealing with packaging products printed with a three-color machine, the designer should understand the situation of the ink. In some printing houses, the color of the ink used is biased. When processing, it is necessary to properly consider reducing the color intensity of the biased color. Some manuscripts do not necessarily need to remove the black version. For example, when reproducing food, you can remove the green version, and when reproducing trees, you can remove the red version. This can maximize the style and level of the original. If the problem of printing color number is taken into consideration during design, the above difficulties will not be encountered before mass production. For example, when we deal with the design of Tsingtao beer carton, we considered that it should be realized by a three-color printing machine, so we successfully implemented the color printing process of corrugated carton watermark and promoted it in the market.

Second, pay attention to level application

Due to the different tastes of designers and the characteristics of products, there are differences in the style of packaging design. Some pursue simplicity and clarity, while others pursue rich levels. But if its design works are realized by flexographic printing, the use of layers in its design must attract the designer's attention.

Because the flexible version is a letterpress, the material has high elasticity and is easy to deform, so the dots increase after compression is more serious, and in the plate-making process, 1% or 2% of the small dots are easily lost during plate washing, during the printing process It can't be reproduced well in the middle, 3% of the dots will be expanded to about 10% after printing, it is impossible to achieve a very soft effect of gradation or gradation from 100% to 0%, so the highlights and darkness that can be expressed by flexographic products There are relatively few levels of tone adjustment, and the high-quality printed products can only reproduce 8% to 10% of the dots. Therefore, less than 8% of the dots in the design cannot be expressed in actual printing. For example, the use of gradient colors, if the dots are gradually reduced to 0%, there will be obvious boundaries or marks at the small dots or where the net is to be cut off, thus affecting the image of the packaging. Although each manufacturer has its own way to overcome or solve this problem, in any case, flexo printing can not be comparable to offset printing. Only considering this feature of the flexo plate in the design, can you realize your design after printing.

As another example, the edge of the image is faded. If it fades to the end of the screen, the problems mentioned above will also occur. This requires designers to consider such problems when packaging design.

In addition, as mentioned earlier, the line number of the anilox roller used in flexo ink transfer is different for the mesh version and the solid version. Large areas of the field are connected with local gradations, making printing very difficult. Especially for the manuscripts with darker colors on the field, the mesh tones are not printed or the colors are lighter on the field; the mesh tones are dirty and dirty on the field. Although it can sometimes be solved by choosing an anilox roller with a moderate number of lines to reduce the number of screen lines in the mesh adjustment part, it is inconsistent with the designer's original design in any case.

It is worth mentioning that in packaging design, gold and silver ink are often used to enrich the packaging design effect and improve the packaging grade. When using gold and silver ink, if the pattern contains mesh tone, it is best to leave some space in the highlight and dark tone, and the dot in the highlight should be more than 20%, because this type of ink printing dot is easy to paste.

3. Consider printing register

Like offset and gravure printing, flexographic printing also involves the problem of overprinting. In the design of flexographic packaging, on the one hand, we must pursue the exquisite pattern, on the one hand, we must also consider the difficulty of printing. For example, for small text and patterns, if it is to be expressed by overprinting, it is difficult to ensure the accuracy of overprinting, which will inevitably lead to an increase in the rejection rate or unsightly printed patterns. This problem is usually solved by trapping. The trapping of corrugated cardboard boxes is usually 0.5 ~ 1mm, and sometimes it may be slightly smaller for different printing machines. If it is difficult to print text and patterns under such a large trap, it must be adjusted accordingly. Especially for the overprint of complementary colors, there will be obvious black borders at the junction of the two colors, which affects the beauty of the packaging. Relatively speaking, dark and light overprint will be much better. In addition, a set of text or color blocks is overprinted by multiple units, which also increases the difficulty of printing. Since most of the flexo printing machines used in China are driven by gears, the regular arrangement of color blocks or lines in one or two colors or multiple colors in packaging design will also cause difficulties in printing.

The embossed pattern on the flexographic plate is formed by brushing off the unexposed parts with a plate washing liquid and a brush, so the flexographic plate has requirements for the size of the smallest characters and thinnest lines. For corrugated box printing, we recommend that the thinnest line should not be less than 0.5mm. If it is an isolated line, it should be widened appropriately. As for the text, it is best to refer to the above data for the stroke thickness. Because the stroke structure of the bold font and the Song font is different, it is not easy to uniformly set the minimum font size. Pay special attention when using the "Big Song" font because the contrast between the horizontal and vertical lines is too large.

In the use of barcodes, because the flexographic plate is easily deformed by pressure during the printing process, the plate material is flatly attached to the round cylinder and deformed, so attention must be paid to the barcode processing. For different printing machines and different bar code sizes, each bar code must have a reduction in advance before plate making to ensure that it can be detected after printing. Of course, this reduction is done by plate-making manufacturers. Here, we should remind designers to pay attention to the direction and size of the barcode. The barcode size should refer to the standard. The barcode direction should be as consistent as possible with the printing direction.

Fourth, pay attention to the typesetting effect of packaging design

In packaging design, the general designer only pays attention to the finished product effect and plane effect of the packaging, and pays little attention to the typographic effect of the packaging. Printing is a mass production process, and the single images of the packaging need to be arranged according to the width of the printing machine and the circumference of the plate roller. Therefore, the layout effect must be considered in the design. Especially when a single pattern needs to be arranged repeatedly, the color of the intersection should be consistent or the connected pattern design is continuous to avoid local patterns on a package appearing on the layout adjacent to each other due to die cutting deviation after printing On the other packaging, resulting in unsightly packaging of the finished product. When designing, try to avoid such typesetting.

The above-mentioned issues related to layout are all small-sized packaging. In fact, many corrugated box packaging are large-sized, such as refrigerators, monitors, etc., when designing these large packages, film output and plate-making size must be considered. limitation. At present, the maximum size of the domestic flexographic platemaking size cannot exceed 2000mm × 1320mm, and the film output is mostly within 1100mm × 800mm. In the design of large-sized packaging, these process characteristics must be taken into account. It is best not to design continuous patterns or overall patterns for patterns exceeding these sizes. Once designed in this way, the plates must be spliced ​​before printing. The splicing must be done carefully. After printing, there will also be obvious interfaces on the patterns, which greatly affects the exquisite packaging. When designing, only considering the convenience of disassembling the printing plate of large-size packaging can the printed product conform to the designer's creativity.

5. Try to use vector software when designing

At present, most designers use computers as tools to display their creativity. Design software has vector forms, such as Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDRAW, etc., and pixel forms, such as Photoshop, Panit, etc., do not use all in the design process. Use Photoshop and other pixel-based software. Photoshop is best used only to process images or create some special effects. Other lines, text, and color blocks are best produced using vector software such as Illustrator, Freehand, etc., so that the manuscript is sent to the plate making company. The plate-making company can make some adjustments to the design draft according to the characteristics of flexographic printing more conveniently and quickly, such as trapping and descending curve, etc., to achieve the effect of convenient printing. When designers deliver their design work in the form of electronic data to printing or plate-making manufacturers, it is best to convert all the text in the design draft into a path before data storage, so as to reduce the receiver's font change due to incomplete font . If more texts need to be changed or the texts are not converted into paths, the corresponding font and design draft should be sent to the data recipient.

In short, in order to print good printing results through the direct flexo printing technology of corrugated boxes, the characteristics of the flexo printing technology of corrugated boxes must be fully considered from the beginning of manuscript design. Made by negotiation.

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