Packaging Design

Print-ready packaging design, inside your storefront

An embeddable design editor your customers work in, exporting PDF/X with CMYK on vector and text, named spot colors, and die-cut paths.

Available for
Web
Mobile
Desktop
The CE.SDK editor with the Cutouts tool open, showing labels and stickers with solid and dashed cut contours ready for PDF export

Trusted by 100+ industry leaders

Digitas
Omneky
The Print Bar
Brandwatch
Planoly
HP
Shopify
Reuters
Hootsuite
Semrush
Shutterfly
one.com
Sprout Social
Constant Contact
Spread Group

Built for platforms that need to scale packaging design

Turn product formats into reusable starting points

Labels, stickers, and flat pack artwork become locked templates your users start from, instead of a blank canvas.

Catch production errors before the press does

Bleed and trim live on the template. Validation checks you adapt run while the user designs, so files reach your printer on spec.

Embed a packaging editor without building one

Add a production-ready design layer to your storefront without spending months on templating, color management, and export tooling.

Key capabilities

Everything needed to embed production-safe packaging design into your platform.

For your users

Browse all capabilities

How to integrate the packaging editor

Four steps from a storefront product page to press-ready output.

Step 01

Add the editor to your storefront

Start from a framework-specific starter kit for React, Vue, Angular, Next.js, or mobile and get a working editor running with minimal configuration. The same engine backs every surface you ship on.

Design Editor UI

The editor embedded in a storefront on desktop and mobile, with the shop chrome and order flow around it
Step 02

Lock the layout inside templates

Author a template per format and lock what must not move. Brand assets, mandatory copy, and placement stay fixed while the customer works on the parts you opened up, so output stays consistent across every order.

Open Placeholder Demo

The placeholder permission panel, with replace, move, scale and rotate enabled and style, duplicate and delete locked
Step 03

Drive variations from your data

Tag copy and imagery as variables, connect a data source, and render the variants server side. Short runs, regional editions, and named packs come out of one template without a browser session per record.

Variable Data Printing

A data table of image URLs driving two rendered variants of the same template
Step 04

Ship press-ready files

Set the ICC profile and bleed for your press, then export PDF/X with CMYK on vector and text, named spot colors passed through, and cutout paths for die-cut products.

Web-to-Print Overview

A design with its bleed margin marked, exporting to PDF

One creative engine across web, mobile, and server

A label, a sticker, and a wrap are different page sizes, not different products. IMG.LY renders all of them from one engine. The file approved on a tablet is the file the server produces at volume. The engine is scriptable for automated artwork updates. It exposes the same surface to AI agents, so a generated design is a real editable scene.

Available for
Web
Mobile
Desktop
I

Structure-aware layouts

Format, margins, and bleed travel with the document, so moving a design from one product to another keeps the artwork on spec.

II

One color pipeline

Define the CMYK profile and spot colors once, and add an underlayer where you print on dark or non-white material. The same settings apply whether a user exports or your server renders a batch.

III

Consistent output everywhere

The same engine powers web, iOS, Android, desktop, and headless rendering, so an interactive design and an automated one produce the same file.

Success story

How The Print Bar Turned Its Editor Into Its Best Salesperson

The Print Bar video

Five-figure

self-service order with zero sales contact

4 weeks

live before peak Christmas season

2-person

dev team, editor maintenance outsourced

The Print Bar is an Australian custom-apparel and print-on-demand company. Founded in a garage in 2011, it now runs production campuses in Brisbane and Melbourne, letting customers design and order custom merchandise online.

Pretty much nothing went wrong for our launch. We demolished our expectations.

Tom Rowe Product & Engineering
The Print Bar
The Print Bar

Challenge

The Print Bar’s customers are overwhelmingly non-designers, yet its design tool — built in 2012 and barely touched since — fought them at every step. Simple actions like resizing text meant digging through settings panels, and customers were abandoning mid-design, during the creative step that should have been the most enjoyable part of the journey.

Solution

The Print Bar rebuilt its design experience on IMG.LY’s CE.SDK: self-hosted, developer-first, and configurable to disappear into its own branding. The editor deliberately removes options for its non-designer audience and quietly enforces print-production requirements — resolution, formats, bleed — in the background, so first-time buyers create production-ready files without ever thinking about DPI.

  • One customer placed a five-figure order entirely self-serve, with no calls or quotes.
  • The relaunch shipped four weeks before peak Christmas season with effectively zero launch issues.
  • A two-person dev team offloaded editor maintenance and refocused on the business.

Why packaging printers trust IMG.LY

Built for production correctness

Device CMYK, named spot colors, ICC profiles, and PDF/X output are first-class, not an export afterthought. Files that leave your platform are files a press will run.

Faster to production, lower build burden

Teams embed a production-ready design layer in days instead of building color management and export tooling in-house. Engineering stays on core product work.

One engine for one-off and volume

The interactive editor and the headless renderer share one template format. A run of ten thousand matches the proof the customer approved.

One engine across platforms and frameworks

The same SDK runs on web, iOS, Android, macOS, and Electron, with React, Vue, Angular, Next.js, and Flutter support. Output stays consistent wherever your users design.

More from IMG.LY

Web-to-Print Design Tool

The wider print editor story, including how print-ready export is put together.

Let customers personalize printed products inside your storefront.

Variable Data Printing

Render thousands of data-driven variants from a single template.

Apparel

The adjacent print product story, for merchandise and on-demand decoration.

AI for Print on Demand

Generate artwork that stays inside print constraints instead of fighting them.

Print

How print businesses run embedded design in production.

Creative SDK

Embed a full-featured photo, video, and design editor in any app.

Creative Automation

Build template-driven creative production pipelines at scale.

Packaging printers are no longer judged only by how well they print

They are also judged by how confidently a customer can design the pack in the first place. IMG.LY embeds that layer directly in your storefront. You get print-safe templates, personalized runs from your own data, and one engine across every surface.

Packaging Design FAQs

Yes. Templates carry locked layouts, so you decide which elements a customer can edit and which stay fixed. Brand assets, mandatory copy, and placement can all be held in place while the customer works on the parts you opened up, which keeps output consistent across every order.

Locked layouts keep customer edits inside the boundaries you define. For the checks themselves, IMG.LY ships design validation as an open starter kit: reference code your team integrates and adapts, flagging low-resolution images and elements outside the page while customers work, so a file leaving your platform has already met your production rules.

CE.SDK includes real-time mockup previews, including 3D product previews, so a customer sees the result rather than a flat sheet. That matters most at approval, where confidence is what turns a design into an order.

CMYK values are preserved end-to-end on export for vector and text elements, including fills, strokes and named spot colors, with no RGB round trip and no profile-based color shift. Raster images export as RGB, and the canvas previews in RGB, so an imported design can look slightly different on screen than on press. Bleed and trim are configured on the template and applied at export. See the web-to-print design tool overview for how the export pipeline is put together.

Yes, through the same engine. Text and image fields bind to your data source, and the headless renderer produces the files server side without a browser session per record. That is the same mechanism described on the variable data printing page, applied to your packaging range.

IMG.LY's SDK runs on web (React, Angular, Vue, Next.js, Svelte), iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter, macOS, and Electron. The same engine powers all of them, so a design made on a tablet renders identically to one made on desktop, and the server produces the same output as both.