From department-store shelves to a daily site, 2007.

Dieline is a website about packaging design, and its name comes from the trade itself: a dieline is the template that shows where a printed sheet will be cut and folded into a box, a bag or a label. The site was started in 2007 by Andrew Gibbs, and for its first eleven years it was called The Dieline. The company’s own About page says it was founded in 2007 by Gibbs, and the trade magazine Label & Narrow Web gave the same founder and year in a column published on 16 November 2009.

That 2009 column, written by Peter Renton for a regular feature on business blogs, reviewed several sites about packaging design for label converters, the printers who turn designs into finished labels. It described The Dieline as a blog showing examples of packaging, each one photographed and usually accompanied by commentary about the designer and the package. It said the site posted three to four times a day, with most posts covering several designs. It also said that the site was then a part-time operation: Gibbs, still its editor in chief, worked a day job as a creative director at a consumer beverage company.

The start-up story has been told in more detail by Inspire, the customer magazine of the Swedish paperboard maker Iggesund, in a profile written about ten years after the launch. The magazine said that in spring 2007 Gibbs had just been given his first job as a packaging designer and went looking for inspiration in Los Angeles department stores, photographing packages on the shelves. Finding little of the kind online, it said, he posted the photographs on a Typepad blog that he named The Dieline.

In the same profile Gibbs put the site’s growth down to need and timing. He said that as a packaging designer he had felt isolated, and that to design good packaging he had to know what else was out there. He also pointed to consistency: his goal from the beginning, he said, was to post new projects every weekday, and the site was still doing so. Inspire met him at the company’s office in the Los Angeles Arts District, where packaging samples, mostly wine and spirits bottles, were lined up in a corner.

Two identities in four years, and a shorter name.

The site’s look has been redesigned twice by outside agencies, and both changes were reported at the time. On 28 January 2014 the design news site Dexigner reported that The Dieline had unveiled a new identity designed by Pearlfisher New York. It described the logo as The Dieline wordmark in black, set beside one of several different package icons in what it called Dieline blue. Pearlfisher New York’s creative director Hamish Campbell said in the announcement that the interchangeable icons were meant to work as a secondary visual language that could support the brand as it grew beyond its website.

The bigger change came in October 2018. Dexigner reported on 10 October 2018 that the site had relaunched with a new creative platform and a new identity developed by Jones Knowles Ritchie, the brand design agency known as JKR. The report said the rebrand included a new name, a new logo and bespoke typography developed with the type studio Letters From Sweden, and that it was introduced through launch films. It referred to the site as Dieline, formerly The Dieline, and gave its founding year as 2007.

According to that report, JKR took its idea from the creative process behind a package: concept and raw ideas, then the finished product, then what comes next. The new elements were to be applied across Dieline’s website and social channels, its award and conference material, and its merchandise. Tosh Hall, then JKR’s global executive creative director, was quoted describing the job as a project for a resource the packaging industry relied on, and said the agency had set out to build lasting equity with the site’s community.

The British branding magazine Transform covered the same relaunch in its weekly round-up of rebrands on 16 October 2018. It also named JKR as the lead agency and Letters From Sweden as the source of the custom typography, and listed the website, social media platforms, awards and conference merchandise as the places the new look would appear. Transform identified Gibbs as chief executive of Dieline and quoted him calling the change a complete overhaul rather than a redesign, focused on the design community and on brands.

Gibbs announced the change on the site the same week, in a post dated 10 October 2018 and titled “Edit, Undo: Meet The New Dieline”. The company now styles its name as DIELINE, in capitals, on its own pages.

Shelves, samples and a name that reads like a tool.

Design-media identities live under unusual pressure, because the people reading them are the same people who make logos, set type and judge layouts for a living. A masthead or wordmark on a design title is read twice: once as a name, and again as a statement of taste. That is one reason so many of these names are set in lowercase, compressed into a single word, or reduced to a short monogram that can sit in a browser tab, a social avatar and a printed cover without changing shape.

Online, the identity is rarely a fixed object. Site redesigns arrive every few years, and each one quietly rewrites the brand: the grid, the article template, the image ratios and the type pairing often say more than the logo does. Newsletters have become a second front page, where a sender name, a subject-line voice and a recurring header carry the identity into the inbox. Events, talks and award programmes add a third surface, turning a publication’s name into signage, lanyards, trophies and stage screens. Studying a design-media brand means looking at all of these together, not only at the mark.

Events, teaching and the team today.

The website has been the centre of a wider business. The Inspire profile listed the spin-offs that had grown from the blog by its tenth year: an annual conference, an international design competition, a jobs page and a book, Box Bottle Bag, which the magazine described as the blog in physical form. Gibbs’s own biography on the site says he started the Dieline Awards competition for packaging design in 2009 and founded the Dieline Conference in 2010, an annual event for people working in packaging design and branding.

Gibbs has also worked inside the wider design-media world. His Dieline biography says he serves as creative director and programming partner for the HOW Design Live conference, that he joined the faculty of ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, in 2014 to teach packaging design, and that he was named editor-in-chief of HOW magazine in 2015. The same biography says he trained as a Climate Reality Leader in 2018 and joined the British campaign group A Plastic Planet, and the company’s About page now names sustainable solutions in its mission.

The company’s current About page describes Dieline as a platform for the packaging community and lists three parts: the editorial site, which carries original articles and projects submitted by readers; DIELINE Awards; and DIELINE Studio, which the company describes as its in-house packaging design agency for product development, custom packaging and sourcing. The page lists Gibbs as founder and editor-at-large, with Bill McCool as editor-in-chief, Chloe Cordover as editor and content manager and Rudy Sanchez as a writer. The site’s footer names the publisher as Dieline Media, LLC.

The editorial format visible in the 2009 column is still recognisable: a pack, photographed, credited to its designer and described in a few paragraphs. In the Inspire interview Gibbs talked about the trends the site had tracked, from what he called neo-retro packaging that looks old and handmade, to a growing demand for sustainable materials, to brands creating one pack for store shelves and another for online orders.

For a design guide, Dieline shows how a publication can take its name from a working document of the trade it covers, then shorten that name once it is established. Compare Brand New, a blog that reviews logo and identity redesigns, and designboom, another online design magazine in this collection. For this guide we use Dieline blue, cut-line sky and press black with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Dieline’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.