A carton is a flat piece of board that either folds up or does not

① The one-line version

A carton is a flat piece of board with a cut line, a crease line and a glue flap, and it either folds up or it does not. Everything a prop maker needs to know is in the net — and the second thing to know is that the health warning on a cigarette pack dates it to the year, in every country separately.

② The net: cut, crease, glue

Two line types do all the work, and a shop reads them by colour long before it reads the dimensions.

• The cut — drawn in rose. It is the knife: the outline of the blank and every window, thumb-notch and tear strip inside it. On a production file it belongs in a spot colour named exactly CutContour, on its own layer, overprinting.
• The crease — drawn in blue, dashed. It is the score rule: where the board bends. It needs its own plate, because the die maker sets creasing rule at a different height from cutting rule. Crease is the name it usually travels under.
• The glue flap — one narrow panel, usually on the rear right, left free of varnish so the adhesive can key.
• Dust flaps belong on the two side panels only, and adjacent flaps must stand apart across a real slit — otherwise the die cannot cut them and the card tears when it is folded.

The vocabulary is the ECMA code, first issued in 1967. Reverse tuck end (the two closures tuck opposite ways) is the pharmaceutical and general default; straight tuck end gives a cleaner front and less tamper evidence. Board for a small carton is 0.40–0.60 mm; the crease allowance grows with the caliper, which is why a thick board needs a wider gap between panels than a thin one.

③ Hinged lids have one correct construction

Every hinged-lid box — the flip-top cigarette pack above all — shares one topology: the front panel takes a straight horizontal cut (the lid’s front edge), the side panels take a straight diagonal cut rising from front to back, and the back panel is not cut at all: it creases, and that crease is the hinge. Draw the back cut and the lid falls off in the actor’s hand. Inside sits a second piece — the inner frame — which the lid closes against; it is cut from thinner card and stands about 13 mm above the lid cut.

⑤ The modern furniture, and its first dates

What	Not before
Barcode (UPC / EAN)	1974 in the USA, 1977 in Europe; unusual on a pack before about 1980
A web address on a consumer pack	about 1995
An e-mail address	mid-1990s
A QR code	about 2010 on consumer packaging
A social handle or hashtag	not before 2008
Vaping products and nicotine pouches	a 2010s product entirely
The chasing-arrows recycling mark	Gary Anderson’s design dates from 1970 and reaches packaging through the seventies
Der Grüne Punkt	the German packaging ordinance of 1991; never on a British-only pack

Tax stamps and banderoles. Continental packs carried a duty banderole glued as a strip over the top closure from the 1880s; Britain used none. The studio draws an invented banderole with invented wording and never a real fiscal stamp — reproducing one is a different kind of problem from reproducing a trademark, and a worse one.

⑦ What dates a pack fastest

• The warning. Country by country, to the year — see the table above. This is the single strongest evidence on any tobacco prop.
• The construction. Soft cup before the mid-1950s; hinged box after.
• The descriptors. No “Lights” before 1972, none in the EU after September 2003.
• The length. 70 mm regular before the war, 85 mm king size after, 100 mm only from 1966.
• The barcode and the URL. 1980 and 1995 respectively.
• The plainness. Olive plain packs are Australia from December 2012 and the UK from May 2017 — and nowhere else before.

⑧ The same pack in six languages

The continent set what the law demanded; the language set the words it was demanded in, and the years are not the same. A European pack is not the British sequence translated — France was first by fifteen years and Spain last by sixteen, and each wording is the real statutory one.

Language	Year	The wording, and the instrument behind it
Français	1976	ABUS DANGEREUX — the Loi Veil. Two words, and the earliest statutory warning on any pack in this collection.
	1991	NUIT GRAVEMENT À LA SANTÉ — the Loi Évin.
	2003	FUMER TUE, on the large band.
Deutsch	1981	DIE EG-GESUNDHEITSMINISTER: RAUCHEN GEFÄHRDET DIE GESUNDHEIT — voluntary from 1981, statutory from 1991, and the wording does not change when the status does.
	2003	RAUCHEN KANN TÖDLICH SEIN.
Italiano	1991	NUOCE GRAVEMENTE ALLA SALUTE.
	2003	IL FUMO UCCIDE.
Español	1992	LAS AUTORIDADES SANITARIAS ADVIERTEN: EL TABACO PERJUDICA SERIAMENTE LA SALUD — the longest of them, and the one that shapes a Spanish pack’s whole front.
	2003	FUMAR MATA.
Ελληνικά	1992	ΤΟ ΚΑΠΝΙΣΜΑ ΒΛΑΠΤΕΙ ΣΟΒΑΡΑ ΤΗΝ ΥΓΕΙΑ — 89/622/ΕΟΚ. Before 1992 this studio prints nothing, because no instrument requiring a Greek pack warning has been found: Greece was outside the EEC until 1 January 1981, and its only anti-smoking effort of the period was the campaign of 1978–80 and the broadcast advertising ban of 1979, neither of which touched the pack. It is an open question in the Archive.
	2003	ΤΟ ΚΑΠΝΙΣΜΑ ΣΚΟΤΩΝΕΙ.

The English sequence, for comparison, is the British one: a voluntary WARNING BY H.M. GOVERNMENT from 1971, TOBACCO SERIOUSLY DAMAGES HEALTH statutory from 1991, SMOKING KILLS on 30 % of the front from 2003, plain packs from May 2017.

⑨ Everything else on the pack changes language too

A warning in French on a pack whose maker line is in English is the commonest mistake in this whole area, and it is why the studio localises the furniture as well as the law. Two of these are worth knowing about on their own.

On the pack	Français · Deutsch · Italiano · Español
Made in	FABRIQUÉ EN FRANCE · HERGESTELLT IN DEUTSCHLAND · PRODOTTO IN ITALIA · FABRICADO EN ESPAÑA
Open here	OUVRIR ICI · HIER ÖFFNEN · APRIRE QUI · ABRIR AQUÍ
Count	CIGARETTES · ZIGARETTEN · SIGARETTE · CIGARRILLOS
Tar, the old yield line	GOUDRON 12 mg · KONDENSAT 12 mg · CATRAME 12 mg · ALQUITRÁN 12 mg
Tar, the later one	GOUDRON 10 mg · TEER 10 mg · CATRAME 10 mg · ALQUITRÁN 10 mg

The German pair is the one to notice: the word for tar on a German pack is Kondensat on the older yield line and Teer on the later one, and swapping them is the kind of detail a German-speaking viewer catches without being able to say why. The Greek equivalents are ΠΙΣΣΑ and ΝΙΚΟΤΙΝΗ, with ΑΝΟΙΓΜΑ ΕΔΩ for the tear tape.

Yield figures themselves are a date. They reach the pack with the British tar-group wording of 1974 and the German milligram figures under the voluntary agreement of 1981; 89/622/EEC mandates them EU-wide from 1991; and the 2016 directive removes them again, replacing the band with a combined picture-and-text warning over 65 % of front and back. Before the 1970s the numbers lived in advertising, not on the pack.

Two descriptor rules that apply in every language at once. “Lights” in any language is a 1970s idea — Marlboro Lights, 1972 — so légères, leicht, leggere, suaves, ligero and ΕΛΑΦΡΙΑ are all wrong before it. And all of them were banned across the EU from September 2003, in every language, along with anything else implying a safer cigarette; the USA followed in June 2010 and Australia with plain packaging in December 2012. Menthol went the same way across the EU in May 2020.

⑩ The strip over the closure, market by market

A continental pack of most of the twentieth century carries a fiscal banderole over the top closure, and Britain does not — which is a tell in both directions.

• France — the banderole: DROITS DE DOUANE ACQUITTÉS / TABACS · TIMBRE FISCAL, 1930s to the 2000s.
• Germany — the Steuerzeichen: STEUERZEICHEN / DEUTSCHE TABAKSTEUER, 1930s to the 1990s.
• Italy — the monopoly strip: MONOPOLI DI STATO / TABACCHI · IMPOSTA, 1930s to the 1990s.
• Spain and the rest of the continent — banderoles from the 1880s.
• Britain used no stamp at all before 2002, and then a printed UK DUTY PAID fiscal mark rather than a separate label. A British pack with a banderole on it is wrong in every year.
• Holographic foils appear on these strips from the 1990s.

Every strip the studio draws is original artwork modelled on the design language of the real ones — engraved guilloche, series-year wording, class designations, cartouches. A real fiscal stamp is a government instrument and reproducing one is an offence, which is why none of these is a scan.

⑪ Plain packaging, and where a branded pack stops being possible

Australia from December 2012; the United Kingdom and France from 2017, with Ireland alongside them; more of Europe since. A fully branded pack in those markets after those dates is duty-free, export, or wrong — and only the designer knows which the scene is.