I've been eating rasins as a snack lately, and was fidgiting with a box last night. I took it apart, and saw that it was a really strange shape outline. So why did they pick that shape? I was thinking that maybe the curves would allow fit intricately within each other.
I took a picture of the box, did a vector clipping mask the image in Photoshop, and then exported the shape to Illustrator. In Illustrator I played around with different configurations, comming up three possible stamping patterns. I bounded each repeating unit by a rectangle, and since each outline was the same size I could get a measure of the waste by simply dividing the area of the bounding unit by the number of shapes it contains, and called it rectangle area per box.
I tried to fit the another row into the space of the second box in the above. That reduced the rectangle area per box by 700 pixels.
Turns out the simplest stamping pattern minimizes the waste, and that the curves are probably there just to make the construction of the box easier. That was disapointing.
