Working with articles

About articles

Articles are grouped pairs of graphical designs (artworks) for the front and rear side of structures. On its part, an artwork is built out of several surface effects — for example, varnishing, images, imprint effects or Braille lettering — each one of them carried in an individual layer.

By using articles you can create different appearances for the same structure, sparing you the need of creating one-off graphics for structures. You only need to create different layers for the different surface processes, and then group these layers into artworks. You then combine, in the article, the artworks into pairs for the front and rear side of the structure.

Using articles in design work

To illustrate how you can use articles in your work, we use as an example a 1-liter juice box that we want to create artwork for. There two scenarios for it:

• ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL DESIGN (creating different artworks for different products) You want the juice box to hold various kinds of juice: apple, apricot, peach and so on. That is, you have one structure that you need to use to hold different tastes. That's why you need different artworks for each taste.
• MULTIPLE CHOICE ENABLING DESIGN (creating different artworks for a structure, and choosing the one that suits a specific task) You need to create artwork for the 1-liter juice box but you want to experiment with various designs before deciding on one of them. You create several artworks, apply them onto the structure, and then make a decision about which set best serves your purpose.

Creating articles

Depending on your technological needs and preferences, you can choose to create articles in either EngView or Illustrator. The integration between the two applications lets you switch between them to modify the structural design and the artwork as the case might arise.

In EngView, you create articles in the 1up drawing and inspect their effect on the structure in 3D drawings. In Illustrator, you need the EngView plug-in to begin creating articles: you create your artwork in the application's canvas and then assign it to variants and articles in the plug-in's articles panel.