Making The Product

Once I was completely happy with the design of the shoebox net, I downloaded the Illustrator file onto a USB and took it over to Digiprint where it was printed onto what I thought was A1 thick paper. I took the sheet back to College and noticed that it was actually slightly wider than A1 which was originally an issue because the card that I was going to place the paper on was only A1. After a while of panicking, a helpful lecturer suggested cutting another sheet of card and spray mounting it onto each end of the original card.

I used spray mount to spray the back of the print, waited about 30 seconds for the glue to dry, then placed it onto the card neatly. I waited a further 15 minutes before cutting along the outline because the glue was still quite slippery and I wanted to make sure the paper wouldn't slide off the card.

Once the 15 minutes was up, I used a scalpel to carefully cut around the net, this was quite a long process because the card was thick and harder to cut through therefore I went over each line a couple of times with the scalpel. When the shape of the net was completely cut out, I gently used the scalpel to make a slight dent on the folds to make the box a lot easier to fold together, this technique also makes the box look neat because the cardboard hasn't creased on the folds. As well as folding the box together, I used the spray mount to stick the flaps together; this process was slow because I had to wait for the adhesive to dry completely on each flap before moving onto the next one. Eventually everything was glued together and the shoebox was complete.

I am pleased that the dimensions that I entered onto illustrator were accurate because the size of the box is ideal. Originally I was slightly nervous that the cardboard wouldn't be thick enough for the box, I had an image in my head of the middle of the lid falling through however luckily that hasn't happened and the package is secure and sturdy. 

Unfortunately, the shoebox isn't perfect and I have noticed a couple of errors. Firstly, although the lid does fit over the base, it is slightly tight and I found myself forcing it over which is a shame because I thought that I had perfected the size of the lid after updating the size of the width on Illustrator after I previously made my prototypes and found the same problem but it seems I didn't increase the size enough. I also noticed that the tops of the logos on each side of the box are cut off when the lid is down which is another error that I made on Illustrator, I should have calculated how much white space should have been left at the top of the sides however overall, I am extremely happy with how the package has turned out, throughout the last few weeks I have experimented with a range of ways of putting the shoebox together and most of them were unsuccessful so I am pleased that I finally found a way around it because I have ended up with the product that I set out to create all those months ago, right at the beginning of the project.