Hi everyone,

I posted this as a question in the Illustrator forum (here's the original thread https://community.adobe.com/t5/illustrator/set-shapes-as-child-and-parent-objects-for-dynamic-box-designs/m-p/11688904?page=1#M256580) and was suggested to submit this as a feature request here.

I design boxes in Illustrator for precise cutting in my Silhouette machine. The main problem I encounter with is when I make a box which its shapes are all perfectly aligned, but I then find that I need to tweak its interior size. When I'm doing so I have to re-align all the different pieces of the box shapes such as the spines, wings, etc, since there's no option to tie a shape to another shape as parent and child behavior which exists in 3d design programs.

As a workaround I'm currently making groups of the shapes I want to be keep intact, and after tweaking the interior shape size I then re-align these groups to the edges of the interior they were previously aligned to.

To describe it better I made 3 screenshots:

• The first is the original design of the box.
• The second is what happens when I resize the interior size of the front of the box, which makes it to overlap its child shapes.
• The third is what I'm after - when resizing a parent shape I want all child shapes to move in distance along with it, without changing their sizes. As for the child shapes that become shorter and need to be resizes to fit to the parent's new size, that is done manually. Keep in mind that a child shape is also a parent shape of another child shape as seen in the screenshots. So if a child shape is resized then its own child shapes should also move in distance along with it.

The arrows in the screenshots comes to describe what is a child object and what is a parent object. The base of each arrow is a child object and where it ends is its parent object.

Having an option to make child and parent behavior would make things much easier when tweaking a design. Or, having a built-in engine to make box designs that has more features specifically for box design would be even better. That engine could automatically adjust the child shapes height/width where a parent shape size is changed. Or even a material thickness preset that calculates the extra size of material needed in mm/cm for the bending of each flap of the box, which is added between the shapes automatically like a "safe zone".

There are external solution plugins for Illustrator like Esko, but I'd really like if Illustrator would have a built-in feature for box designs without paying for additional plugins. I'm still using my CS6 version since its a permanent license which I prefer better over subscription plans, and I am quite aware that if my feature is picked up for development then it would be implemented in the CC version and not CS6. Yet if that feature will be made then I'll re-consider the CC plans.

Thanks!