Lesson Tasks (Packaging Design)

LT 3.1

Using the logo you created in Week 1 and the brochure you designed in Week 2, think about your brand and design packaging for your product. Remember that you can decide about the detail of your product. Is it dog biscuits, meat products in a tin, dry pellets or a new and exciting product?

Do your design according to the following steps:

  • Exploration
    Use sketching techniques to draw thumbnails and hand in your thumbnails as scanned PDFs.
  • Brand integration
    Choose one of your thumbnails and refine your design. Place it next to your brochure and logo and see how you can merge your design with the brand identity. Also, what fundamentals of the brand can you draw from and use in your design? Hand in a picture of your thumbnails, mock-ups, logo and brochure together.
  • Design
    Now design your packaging properly, using any design application of your choice (or a combination of e.g. Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator). Export the flat design as a PDF.
  • Testing
    Print out the final design and make a mock-up. Make sure all panels line up when folded and glued. See to it that the information flows well on all panels.
  • Presentation
    Take pictures of your printed mockup to show off the various aspects and angles of your packaging. You can also make a digital mock-up*.
     

* You are allowed to use found Photoshop mockups of the packaging, but don’t let the available options limit you. Rather explore unique packaging solutions that enhance your product offering.

First off before I started sketching out ideas, I figured I wanted to do find some inspiration and do research about different materials and shapes of packaging for the type of product I am going for, dry pellets. After doing this I figured I wanted to go for a cut-out box which will help for functionality. I want the packaging to be Medium, so about 800g.

Exploration: I started sketching out thumbnail designs to get a few to choose from. This is a good way to eliminate bad ideas and even combine different sketches into a whole new idea making it easier in refining stage where I select one to go further with.

Brand Integration/Refine: I combined a few of my thumbnail ideas and refined this design. After this I started testing to see how I could integrate the design more with my other products like the logo and brochure, so I added a liquid line on the top side as well as the bottom. This way it feels more connected with the brochure design. I also added some turkey legs next to the ”turkey flavour” on the front side to add more detail and make the taste more clear.

Design: I started designing my packaging in Illustrator. I set up 4 artboards in A3, with 2 of them being halfed which would be the sides. Then i added the basic elements to get the layout I wanted. I made the turkey legs, added those and then started thinking how I could make the design better.

Testing: I started to make a mock-up to see how my design fits on a package. This way I can see flaws with the design I would have to fix to make it fit if it doesn’t. Due to the packaging I wanted which is the cut-out box, I have to redesign the front so the heading actually fits. I also added a heading to the backside to add more clearity in which brand the product belongs to. I feel this fills out the overall design more. Lastly I made the quote on the last side page smaller to make it fit better as well.

After re-designing the front so the heading fits better, I started the presentation stage.

Presentation: I used a mock-up image I found online, took it into Photoshop and lined up the design. Due to me not finding a good enough mock-up template of a cut-out box, this is the solution I came up with. Here is the result of my final mock-up for the dog food packaging.

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