By: Erik Vlietinck
Mon, October 17, 2005 - 10:30:00
Pros: Easy to use, perfect paper trim, flexible, professional results possible
Contras: No European A4 page sizes available

http://www.jewelboxing.com
Score:

Art and design, as we know, is not limited to the content you’re creating. It has everything to do with the packaging as well. There’s probably no computer vendor in the industry who is mastering this as well as Apple. Graphics designers, advertising people, video creatives and others often deliver their creative content in digital format, on a CD or DVD. Jewelboxing supports creative packaging for this purpose.

Jewelboxing is a firm in the US which delivers both the “hardware” and the software to create good-looking and well-designed packaging for CDs and DVDs. Jewelboxing enables designers to showcase their skills before the client has even looked at the content itself.

Jewelboxing sells jewelboxes with inkjet (but laserjet-printable as well) sheets of paper, and it gives away templates for InDesign, Illustrator, QuarkXpress, Photoshop, etc. They sell these in small enough quantities to be useful to individual designers or small creative firms.

A Jewelbox is not A Jewelbox

Let’s start with the jewelboxes themselves. These are usually poorly designed and fragile. The Jewelboxing jewelboxes are those which are sometimes used by classical music labels for Super Audio CDs. Those jewelboxes have rounded corners, allow for more creative output in the different areas of the jewelbox (the spline, the hinge side, the front side, backside and inside tray), are stronger and can accommodate two CDs on one spindle.

Such jewelboxes are more expensive than the standard ones, but that doesn’t matter much with SACDs --those are expensive anyway.

Jewelboxing’s standard size jewelboxes are of this kind; the company also has DVD-sized jewelboxes that look the same, i.e. fully transparent on all sides and with rounded corners. Jewelboxing’s boxes also come with a specially designed thumb-operated locking mechanism at the opening, greatly enhancing their robustness.

When you receive the boxes, they are disassembled. The box itself is assembled, the disc platter is separate. This allows you to print a design on the tray inset before assembling the whole system.

The system comes with three types of inkjet paper, all of them perforated: a booklet sheet, a tray cover sheet holding two tray designs, and a CD-label sheet holding two labels. The paper is matte, but my HP Photosmart 8750’s ink did feather out at all, not even at higher levels of coverage. The paper is of a very bright white, which gives bright colours and high contrast.

The paper sheet area is where I have some criticism. It’s not the type of paper or its ink-absorbing quality I’m having problems with. It’s with the sheets that hold two tray insets and two labels I’m having a problem. I would prefer to see sheets with one label and one tray inset at a time. That way I wouldn’t have to design two jewelboxes at once. 

On the other hand, it’s more environment-friendly to have two of them on one sheet. And most people will have a need for copies anyway, so it’s not a big deal.

The templates are of excellent quality. I tried all of the Adobe templates and they all produced very accurate results, even without having to calibrate my printer.

Once you have designed and printed your tray insets, labels and booklets, you can start assembling the jewelbox. This involves folding along the perforations until you can tear off the bleed area. Only in the rounded corners of the paper did I need scissors and only because I was afraid the corners would crease. The perforations are small enough not to be visible once the paper is inside the box. The result is a jewelbox that is as much a part of a presentation or a design as the design itself.