Product, Audience, and Placement

Every design must communicate something to the viewer, and in packaging design the communication is particularly urgent. Packaging can make or break the sale of a product, so it must speak to the customer instantly. What are some of the design considerations that inform this visual language? Let's look at some of the issues that packaging designers must think about.

Product Category

Most importantly, always remember that the type of product will drive your design decisions. The Carolina Herrera example we looked at earlier shows that a high-end product such as a subtle and sophisticated fragrance requires a specific design solution: simple graphics, elegant colors, and quiet and subtle color schemes. A bottle of bleach or a chocolate wrapper would require a completely different treatment.

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Researching the visual "rules" of a product category is essential in packaging design. People will not buy a crazy-looking toothpaste brand if they cannot identify it as toothpaste.

One important variable is color. Every product has its own visual rules and conventions. Bleach bottles, for example, are always white, with some clean blue text or red highlights. Who'd buy bleach in a dirty brown bottle? Chocolate bar wrappers, on the other hand, use shades of brown and purple to create to communicate the product and inspire indulgence. As a designer, it's your job to thoroughly research these established conventions before you begin your work.

Figure 10.8. What color should a bleach bottle be? Check out the visual conventions of the product category before you go too wild.

The food packaging industry shows why such "color rules" are paramount. Proper color choices are essential to making food packaging appealing and appetizing. The color of a food is generally represented in its brightest and liveliest colors and alongside complementary color combinations (think of yellow pasta peeking out of a blue box). Nothing can or should be more appetizing than the food itself.

Figure 10.9. Candidas chocolate packaging, designed by PlanetPropaganda. A bold, modern design anchored by colors that unmistakably evoke the luxury of chocolate.

It's also worth noting that colors are used to evoke specific feelings about a food product. Reds and oranges make food seem warm or hot (think frozen entrees or spicy chips). Brown or muted oranges make it appear wholesome, as seen in many bread and rice products. A few years back, green signified vegetables, but now this color is used to represent a healthy food choice. Blues, purples, and other vibrant colors are used on snack foods to make them appear more fun and eye-catchingwitness that oh-so-tempting Oreo cookies packet.

One color that is rarely seen in food packaging is black. In the 1960s, the Screaming Yellow Zonkers brand broke this unspoken rule and used a mainly black box for its popcorn product. Hystericalgreat packaging for a zany product. Who would have thought to put food in a black carton? The designers made it work because it was not your usual party snack food. As the name implies, it was over the top, funky, and different.

Figure 10.10. Screaming Yellow Zonkers broke the mold in food packaging when the company's black-colored bag was first introduced in the 1960s.

Target Audience

Just as important as the type of product in packaging design is the target audience. That's right, you are designing pieces to be picked up, purchased, and possessed. As packaging designers, we must be sensitive to what we are packaging and whom we are targeting. It's not just design for design's sake.

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Marketers may provide you with data on customers, but it's your job to figure out how to communicate to them.

Most of the time, you will get information about your target audience from someone who has done extensive market researchmarketeers, I call them. In any large company, it is a marketing group's job to study a product's target audience, using marketing surveys, focus groups, studies of purchasing patterns, and so on. Market analysis results in customer profiles that can be astonishingly detailed, indicating a whole set of characteristics and preferences about the ideal customer.

Once these bold marketeers' research is compiled, it is generally handed to the design team at a start-up meeting to help everyone focus on creating the best product and packaging designs for the customer. Some quite granular marketing data can become part of your design process. But while such data is important to your design, you should not pander to it. Designers must always supplement it with their own visual instincts and knowledge of styles.

Placement

You will not be responsible for the actual placement of your items on store shelves (good thing, too, because this generally happens in the middle of the night), and in fact, you generally won't even know how or where your package eventually will be placed. This makes it more important that you consider all sides of your carton design.

Figure 10.11. There's no missing this Archer Farms product line by Templin Brink Design: Bold, vivid colors and a nice use of contrast ensure that these products stand out.

I know you were thinking that your carton would be front and center on the very best shelf. That would be nice. Those decisions are complicated and have to do with financial bartering for "in-store real estate." Store placement is a tough arena in which companies compete for the best location, often actually paying retailers for prime positioning.

Next time you are in your supermarket, notice how foods are placed for the consumer. Where are those sugary cereals whose cartons are covered in popular cartoon characters? At a kid's eye level. There is no escape for the unknowing parent. The lesson is to make sure you evaluate each panel as you design in terms of its potential placement. Will it work on the very top shelf? How about the very bottom one? In shadows or in bright light? Try out your designs in best-and worst-case scenarios.