Creating a box with your hand crafted deck.

Every time I finished the daunting task of printing, laminating cutting and corner rounding one of my decks, I was at a loss as to what to put it in or how to package it for sale.

So it became necessary to design a box. I had no drawing board or tea square and I did a rough sketch on a sheet of paper, working out the dimensions I needed. Then, I opened Adobe Illustrator and went to work trying to learn how to use that program.

For some reason it did not have some of the tools it was supposed to have like the curve tool so I was limited to using strait lines. I still don't know how to use Adobe Illustrator, but I did the best I could and designed a quick box that fit on an 8.5 X 11" sheet of card stock.

Then I played around with some color and brought in some pictures and in one afternoon I had a great looking box for my cards!

But there were some problems. The card stock did not print very good color, and I was not happy with the faded look. The glue was messy, and a scotch taped box looked second rate and the box was also very flimsy. I just did not have any heavy box paper to use.

The glue problem: I found some double sided tape that worked wonderfully. It was Scotch brand Poster tape. It worked like a charm, no glue mess, no fuss, no waiting.

For the box, I switched to matt brochure 48 lb card stock paper and after printing the box, I laminated one side of it. Then cut it out, and bent it to make a box and used the double sided tape to hold it together.
It printed beautiful, and it bent well. I had a nice professional looking and somewhat sturdy box in an afternoon. Much better than a sandwich bag or rubber bands.

Here is this article on my site with a picture of the completed box custom made for my hand crafted deck.

http://www.infinitevisionstarot.com/box-design.html


P.S. Currently I am waiting for some black ink to arrive so I can resume printing my decks, but for now I am making boxes using my other printer.

For my next edition of my cards I am using a Canon Pixima 9500 photo printer. It is very high rated for quality and gets a wide range of tones. These ranges of tones can be noticed more when you are printing black and white but I notice them in my color designs. I am very excited about improving the look of my deck and now it will be in a box. I am also working on a little white book to go with it. I am hoping to finish that in about two weeks.

There are links in this thread to both an online source for making tuck boxes and to blue_fusion's deviantart page where he has a diagram for making two-part boxes.

I use Visio to design my two-part boxes.

Rodney

Very nice cards! There was a post here somewhere with box patterns. I can't find it, but I did find one online -

tarot box

Have you ever filled your own ink cartridges? I do it all the time - it's much cheaper. Also, instead of the poster tape, Gorilla tape works great.

Creating bezier curves in Illustrator

I understand your frustration with curves in Illustrator - I looooathed it until I learned how to use the pen tool, then it changed my life You draw curves using the same pen tool that you use to draw straight lines, you just manipulate it differently.

Here is an excellent PDF tutorial: http://www.oit.umass.edu/workshops/tutorials/images_publishing/ai_2.pdf
And practice sheets: http://veerle.duoh.com/blog/comments/illustrator_pen_tool_exercises/

And to keep this on=topic - - your prototype looks good! I hope you get picked up soon enough and don't have to do it all yourself, because your deck is so, so beautiful.

irmata said:

I understand your frustration with curves in Illustrator - I looooathed it until I learned how to use the pen tool, then it changed my life You draw curves using the same pen tool that you use to draw straight lines, you just manipulate it differently.

Here is an excellent PDF tutorial: http://www.oit.umass.edu/workshops/tutorials/images_publishing/ai_2.pdf
And practice sheets: http://veerle.duoh.com/blog/comments/illustrator_pen_tool_exercises/

And to keep this on=topic - - your prototype looks good! I hope you get picked up soon enough and don't have to do it all yourself, because your deck is so, so beautiful.

Click to expand...

The instructions in Illustrator said that there was a "curve" tool but I could not find one. All I could find was a line tool and the pen tool seemed to be completely free hand. I can't draw an accurate curve free hand. I am thinking my program is missing some tools for some reason.

If by "picked up" you mean a publisher, I have read the problems with going that route so I am not even attempting to look for one at this point. I am printing, laminating, cutting and corner rounding, all myself. Now I am printing and making boxes and working on my Little White Book.

I hope to have some ready this month!

Thanks for the links, I will read them later.