The Packaging Designer's Book of Patterns

Lászlo Roth, George L. Wybenga

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118420843
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Grafikdesign

The essential packaging design resource, now with more patterns than ever!

For more than two decades, The Packaging Designer's Book of Patterns has served as an indispensable source of ideas and practical solutions for a wide range of packaging design challenges.

This Fourth Edition offers more than 600 patterns and structural designs—more than any other book—all drawn to scale and ready to be traced, scanned, or photocopied. Online access to the patterns in digital format allows readers to immediately use any pattern in the most common software programs, including Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. Every pattern has been test-constructed to verify dimensional accuracy. The patterns can be scaled to suit particular specifications—many are easily converted to alternate uses—and most details are easily customizable. Features of this Fourth Edition include:

• More than 55 new patterns added to this edition—over 600 patterns in all
• A broad array of patterns for folding cartons, trays, tubes, sleeves, wraps, folders, rigid boxes, corrugated containers, and point-of-purchase displays
• Proven, scalable patterns that save hours of research and trial-and-error design
• Packaging patterns that are based on the use of 100% recyclable materials
• Includes access to a password protected website that contains all 600+ patterns in digital form for immediate use

Comprehensive and up to date, The Packaging Designer's Book of Patterns, Fourth Edition enables packaging, display, and graphic designers and students to achieve project-specific design objectives with precision and confidence.

1

Introduction

17th Century Dutch Paper Mill

Paper is among the noblest of human inventions. It is worthwhile, therefore, to begin with a short history of papermaking.

Before books could be written and preserved, a writing surface had to be developed that was light, not too bulky, and was easily stored. The first great advance was the Egyptians’ use of papyrus in the third millennium B.C. Sheets of beaten papyrus stems were fastened together into scrolls, some more than 120 feet long, that could be rolled up for storage. After papyrus came parchment, which was perfected in Asia Minor in the city of Pergamum (from which its name is derived) in the second century B.C. Animal skins had long been used as a writing surface in Greece and Rome, but it was in Pergamum that methods were evolved for the production of a durable, velvet-smooth parchment that could be written on on both sides.

Detail of an Egyptian papyrus scroll (ca. 2500 B.C.).

For hundreds of years all paper was made by hand from rag pulp. The use of wood fibers to make paper was discovered in the mid-1800s. In 1840 Friedrich G. Keller in Germany invented a way to grind logs into a fibrous pulp; this method produced a rather poor quality of paper, as all parts of the wood–not just the fibers–were used.

Paper as we know it today was first made in China in 105 A.D. Ts’ai Lun, a member of the court of Emperor Ho Ti, succeeded in turning husks of cotton fibers into paper pulp. This method spread throughout China, Korea, and Japan and as far west as Persia. In 751 A.D. Moslems captured a Chinese paper mill in Samarkand and learned the method of papermaking. They brought the method to Spain around 950 A.D., and by the thirteenth century paper mills had been established throughout Western Europe, first in Italy and then in France, Germany, England, and Scandinavia.

Egyptian scribe using paper made from papyrus.

The first paper mill in America was built in 1690 by William Rittenhouse near Philadelphia. Sheets of paper were produced one at a time until 1799, when Nicholas Louis Robert developed a continuous process. (This method was patented in England by the Fourdrinier brothers and is known by that name.) In 1817 the first cylinder-type papermaking machine, which can produce a better quality of paper in a continuous process, was invented by John Dickenson.

Early Chinese print on paper (ca. 300 A.D.).

MODERN PAPERMAKING

Today almost all paper is manufactured from wood. Cellulose fibers (which account for 50 percent of the content of wood) are the primary ingredient, followed by lignin (about 30 percent), which acts as a fiber binder or glue.

Water plays an important role in modern papermaking. The manufacture of 1 ton of paper requires about 55,000 gallons of water, most of which is recycled. The papermaking process also uses sulfur, magnesium, hydroxide, lime, salt, alkali, starch, alum, clay, and plastics (for coating). There are two basic types of paper: fine paper for writing and paper for printing and industrial use (packaging).

The first step in manufacturing paper from wood is to remove the bark. The cheapest way to separate the fibers is to grind up the wood by forcing the logs against grindstones submerged in water. The water carries off the wood fibers. In this process everything is used, and the paper produced is of low quality. Another, more frequently used process is chemical pulping, in which the wood is chipped into small pieces, the fibers are extracted through a chemical process, and the unusable material is eliminated. Chemical pulping is more expensive, but it produces better-quality paper.

Diagram of a papermill (greatly simplified). The pulp is ejected in a thin layer onto the conveyer-sieve (A). The pulp is then pressed through a great number of cylinders (B) and dried by a series of heated cylinders (C). It is then calendered (D) and taken up by the web (E).

Chemical pulping creates a pulp, which is then refined by washing and separating the fibers. Refinement, a time-controlled process during which the manufacturer can add various chemicals to increase bonding, texture, and water resistance, increases the quality and strength of the paper. Pigments (for coloring) and coatings (plastics) can also be added at this stage.

Once the pulp is prepared, it goes to one of two types of machines: The Fourdrinier, or the cylinder machine. Modern papermaking machines are huge. They can be as long as a city block and several stories high. They produce paper up to 30 feet wide at a speed of 3,000 feet per minute, resulting in 800 miles of paper a day! The primary papermaking machine is the Fourdrinier. Most Fourdrinier machines make only one layer of material, although they can be equipped to make several layers.

Paper produced by a Fourdrinier machine is smoothed by a stack of highly polished steel rolls, a process known as calendering. The finished paper is then cut, coated, and laminated.

Another frequently used papermaking machine is the cylinder machine. This machine makes heavy grades of paperboard, gene...