Overview

Industrial designers need a measured combination of flexibility for creativity and precision for executing designs to meet mechanical requirements. With most CAD built mainly to meet mechanical requirements, this flexibility is sacrificed, limiting creative exploration and quick ideation.

Meet Veritiv’s internal design agency, Vine which bridges this gap by taking a holistic approach and integrating Shapr3D into their workflow. The result? The cross-functional team cuts conceptualization time by upwards of 30%. Get an in-depth look at the workflow of Vine’s industrial designers, engineers, and brand services working alongside each other here.

At a glance

• 95% faster process time
• 30% faster concepting time
• One-round feedback

About Vine and William

While Veritiv is one of the leading providers of packaging, print, and facility solutions in the industry, it wanted to add more personalized packaging and rebranding strategies for customers. So in 2020, it launched an internal design agency, Vine. The agency combines the fields of engineering, industrial design, and branding. The group has access to an extensive range of manufacturing technologies, making it easier to design for the client’s initial vision. 

For Senior Industrial Designer, William, of Vine, this capability to design more honestly for the customer was what drew him to join the Veritiv group. He’s joined by Adam, engineer, and Michelle, brand specialist, who work with additional industrial designers, engineers, and brand specialists across the company. Together, they offer comprehensive services in package design alongside overall brand redesign, leaning on Shapr3D for front-end conceptualization. 

Why Shapr3D

While what initially drew William to work with Shapr3D was the prospect of designing on iPad, it was the quick importing and concepting ability that proved most useful for the team. Previously, William worked with a variety of CAD software from Creo to Fusion 360 and, finally, SolidWorks on PC coupled with Procreate on iPad. Translating designs between Windows and Apple ecosystems and using the model as an underlay for sketching was complicated. William found that designing on iPad with the Apple pencil was just as natural as designing on paper. And he could effortlessly import his designs across ecosystems for more effective communication. 

But it was struggling with lengthy import time that pushed William to experiment in Shapr3D. Aligning on concepts upfront between engineering and industrial design was challenging due to slow load time, concepting, and editing. This then delayed moving from ideation to product development. Struggling through the process got William wondering: how long would an import take on iPad using Shapr3D? William was pleasantly surprised when the process time was slashed by 95% and the group could align significantly faster.

Challenges

• Lengthy import time slows down starting projects
• Cumbersome part environment inhibits component ideation
• Upfront alignment is delayed without clear and quick concepts

Solutions

• Quick import-export makes project start immediate 
• Quick ideation and component manipulation make sketching more efficient
• Quick concepting allows for effective collaboration to fit stakeholder needs

Skipping load time. Straight to ideation.

William and the Vine team were working on a showerhead design for a customer when he first started experimenting with Shapr3D. At that point, just importing a CAD file took 45 minutes. The lag was stunting William’s process. So he turned to Shapr3D and the outcome was convincing:

“It was something ridiculous — 30 seconds or a minute and a half to open up the file in Shapr3D.”

This prompted William to delve into Shapr3D and utilize the export feature more. He found it allowed him to export an image of the showerhead with a transparent background. Not only could he use this as an underlay for sketching but also as features in his image. Since this first showerhead project, William now regularly uses the model view in a customer-facing drawing or sketch.

Flexible. Instinctive. Component manipulation. 

Once William opened the shower head file from the customer in Shapr3D, he was able to make several iterations of the concept in a fraction of the time.

“I was able to open the model in under a minute in Shapr3D and then within 15 minutes, I had five or six copies of different orientations of the product inside of potential packaging shapes. That’s when I was really able to understand how powerful and intuitive the Shapr3D modeling environment was.”

William found that manipulating components was much more accessible and fluid. He was able to bring the product in, box-select groups of components, add them, and then very easily select those components and move them around in 3D space. Typically, achieving this in other CAD was much more tedious because of the difficulty of selecting and manipulating components quickly, particularly in groups. 

The ability to readily manipulate components with Shapr3D quickly creates clarity around the design. William knows exactly how the orientation of the product relates to the overall size of the box and the view from the outside of the box. He also has a clear idea of how the consumer can access the components as they start to unbox the product.

“The Shapr3D modeling environment feels much more intuitive for me. It feels much more like touching a product and moving it around my table.”

Engineering and Industrial Design collaborate with quick concepting. 

With Shapr3D fitting neatly into the Vine group’s process, the team was better equipped to collaboratively design an easier unboxing experience. The solution: present each product component in the sequence needed for installation. After the team visited retail spaces to check the current display along with competitor displays, William and Adam shared initial sketches and 3D models they drew up in Shapr3D. With a quick export to Miro, the team worked seamlessly between Miro and Shapr3D to ideate designs and group them with other inspirational imagery from the industry and parallel industries. 

“We try to set up the project in a way that spurs creativity but also maintains interest and motivation for designers and engineers that are part of the project. We’ll work back and forth in that initial creative phase, sketching concepts as a group or more refined was individually moving back and forth between 3D modeling [in Shapr3D] with rough shapes and sizes and different orientations of the concept.”

With guardrails in place, the team was ready to move forward. They had both a specific design concept and requirements for the machinery or processes for constructing and filling the package. The team delivered initial concepts to the customer in record time. The catch? The concept was different from what the customer had in mind. It was back to the drawing board but with a 30% savings on concepting time. The team closed the neverending feedback loop to deliver the showerhead design exactly to client vision.