Guide to Printing Corrugated Boxes

Our latest blog provides a top-line guide to producing printed corrugated boxes. We hope you find it useful.

Digital printed boxes: Digital printing is the most cost-effective solution for short run corrugated boxes. Artwork needs to be set up as CMYK colours.

Litho printed boxes:? Litho printing is the highest quality option. You mount printed sheets onto the corrugated material. Litho enables you to print pantone colours, special colours such as gold or add finishing touches such as foiling. For larger print runs litho can work out cheaper than digitally printed boxes. ?

Flexo printed boxes: Flexo printing is the cheapest form of printing. Most suitable up to 2-colour printing. The tooling costs are a lot more expensive than other forms of printing, so flexo printing is only cost effective for larger print runs.?

Screen printed boxes: Screen printing is suitable for mid-range quantities of boxes. Whilst we can’t digitally print white onto a brown colour material, we can screen print white onto a brown material. You can also print pantone colours with screen printing.?

Pros vs Cons for Lamination

We do not include a lamination for most of our corrugated box productions. The pros and cons are below...

Pros: adds durability & protects the print.?

Cons: less eco-friendly, added cost, dulls down your print colour.

Type of Corrugated Board

The?flute size?determines the thickness of the corrugated material and gives the box its stacking strength. Popular flute grades below:

• E-flute (1.5mm thickness), which is popular for standard size mailing boxes and product boxes. Its high-quality surface makes it ideal for full colour printing.
• B-flute (3mm). This is thicker than e-flute making it perfect for larger boxes such as transit packaging.

A basic board is a single wall made from two outer liners and a single fluting. You also get double wall and triple wall boards.

For added eco-creds we can use Forest Stewardship Council? (FSC?) certified material.