Every year, the KURZ design team brings the latest trends in the packaging industry to life with its Trend Boxes. You used DREAMCOMPOSER^® to visualize the new edition. How did the tool help you make your finishing ideas tangible and plannable?

Julia König: "Packaging is never flat - but that's how it's designed in the first step. DREAMCOMPOSER^® brings our ideas into three dimensions. The realistic representation of our transfer products is particularly helpful: The ratio of matte and gloss effects can be seen much better than in the design software, which mainly works with colors. Light, gloss, and reflection would be very difficult to reproduce there."

Constantin Prussak: "For us, DREAMCOMPOSER^® is primarily a tool for creating a common understanding of a project. The software can be used to create 3D prototypes that make different materials and processes more tangible than in pure 2D design without finishing effects."

What has helped you the most?

Julia König: "One absolute game changer is that DREAMCOMPOSER^® allows us to see new colors and SILVER LINE^® designs, for example, while they are still in production - at a stage when there are no physical samples available yet. In addition, when digitally folding the boxes, we can immediately check whether continuous lines and surfaces converge cleanly. This saves an enormous amount of time because complex mock-ups are often no longer necessary."

Were there any particular challenges or insights during the visualization process?

Julia König: "For the current trend boxes, we worked with numerous new LUMAFIN^® products and layered them on top of each other. In the first digital draft, it was difficult to see whether a transfer product was positioned above or below another and how this would affect the print. In DREAMCOMPOSER^®, this became immediately clear. We could see directly in which order embossing had to be done, so that effects and overlays would interact perfectly."

Constantin Prussak: "DREAMCOMPOSER^® works perfectly with classic shapes, such as rectangular boxes or labels. Things get exciting with more complex designs such as foldable beer carriers, pillow boxes, or objects with rounded sides. For the trend boxes, we had to play around with the tool a bit and think outside the box from time to time. That's exactly what makes it so appealing: You constantly discover new possibilities and find creative ways to visualize the desired design."

How did the collaboration between the design team and product management go?

Constantin Prussak: "It was really close and ongoing. We chat regularly to make sure new colors or effects, like the ones the design team came up with for the trend boxes, are available in DREAMCOMPOSER^® as quickly as possible. This direct line of communication is key."

What should users keep in mind to get the most out of the tool?

Julia König: "There is currently no faster way to realistically display structures such as nano, micro, or relief effects from our subsidiary H+M, as well as finishes with transfer products. You should definitely take advantage of that. The share link is also particularly powerful. It allows designs to be shared easily and coordinated in real time with your own team or customers."

Constantin Prussak: "DREAMCOMPOSER^® is a great tool for quickly visualizing initial ideas and obtaining a well-founded assessment of our effects. However, it is important to comply with the basic file and structure requirements. For example, we often see users creating cuts and folds in a single layer of the source PDFs. This may work for many industrial applications, but for DREAMCOMPOSER^® separate layers must be created."

'60° – creative boxes to inspire' reflects trends and social issues. What is the central theme behind the current issue and how did you implement it in your design?

Julia König: "We are currently observing a kind of resignation - not as stagnation, but rather as recognition of the complexity of our times. The world is not black and white, but multi-layered and contradictory. This pause creates space for reflection, new energy, and ultimately for change. For design, this means a creative restart: When clear trends dissolve, new movement emerges. Styles blur and flow into one another - in fashion, on social media, in new technologies. The boxes capture precisely this tension. We deliberately worked with maximum contrasts, for example in box Antithesis, which juxtaposes paper and transfer products. Large-scale applications further enhance the effect of color, gloss, and depth."