Process: Packaging Design
Process: packaging design1/Discovery
InterviewWhat?
This is where we gather an understanding of the personality and goals of your brand and the technical details of your product. It’s basically us asking you a lot of questions and listening to your story.
Why?
Next, we get to the bottom of why you’re choosing to launch this product. If you’re a startup, what’s driving you to start this venture? Rebranding? What’s not working with your current packaging?
Who?
Effective packaging design resonates with your audience and attracts new people to your product. Getting to know the likes and dislikes of those people informs many of our design decisions.
researchAfter we’ve had our launch interview, we get going on some secondary research to learn more about your market. We gather details on your existing or potential product/brand peers. This helps us to see the landscape where your product will exist. It helps to prevent any overlap and, most importantly, reveals where you can differentiate among your closest competitors.
outcomesCreative Brief
Once we’ve collected enough information to create a clear picture we take an inventory of what we know. The result is a one page creative brief. This is a document to confirm that we’re on the right track. We’ll look at this together so that you can weigh in on whether you believe it’s an accurate reflection of your brand and your product.
This is also a great tool to use during the process. We refer back to it occasionally while we sketch out our design decisions. We often revisit it before our initial presentation of suggestions as a way of fortifying our design decisions.
For packaging design projects we sometimes include mood boards with our creative brief. These are usually to illustrate mood, personality, and concept. We avoid pointing at other brands, specifically, to keep our focus on differentiation.
2/Sketching
This part of the process happens mainly in our office…or at home…or in the grocery line. Here is a simple description of how it works.
Talking it outWe usually start by dedicating a morning to collecting our thoughts about what we’ve learned. We’ll talk in detail about the kind of visual brand we see emerging and design strategies that show promise.
flat concepts In the Lakuna Design office we’ve developed something called Flat Concepting. It’s where we produce a large volume of ideas in rapid succession without stopping to reflect or criticize. We sketch on paper and virtually. This is a great way to get the weaker ideas out of the way and to invite happy accidents and avoid self-consciousness.
Once we have exhausted the Flat Concepting process, we take a look at the landscape and pull out the strongest ideas for development.
3/Development
dieline application At this point we take the best of the best (1 to 3) and fine tune them. We begin to apply the ideas to a production dieline and start to employ strategies from our sketching phase for layout, communication, and personality.
mockups and prototypesAs we flesh out ideas in dielines we check them in digitial mockup files and will occasionally construct prototypes. This allows us to get accurate readings on things like scale and legibility.
OutcomesMulti-page presentation outlining our design suggestions. We don’t usually present more than three and most times it’s two. Our thorough preparation allows us to narrow down potential choices to the most effective.
These presentations are comprehensive. We include a description of our thinking behind each idea. We also include a glimpse of how the product’s brand and identity may work outside of the packaging (merchandise, promotion, etc.)
Below are three sample presentation pages from a recent Packaging Design project:
4/Finalization
ReviewAfter you have seen our initial presentation, the process will move in either of two directions. You may see a clear winner and we will jump right to the Preparation phase. If not, we will review each suggestion in detail to get a clear picture of your impressions. After that, using the building blocks of this first round we will agree on a plan to finalize the packaging. A second round presentation will happen to review these edits and the packaging will be finalized. Our goal is to land on a solution that you will be proud to use as your product’s packaging and we will feel confident that it is going to work effectively for on and off the shelf.
preparationThe Preparation phase involves us confirming all elements that will be required on your packaging. In the case of alcohol products, this includes a checklist of compliance details.* At this point we will also be using your production partners dielines to build print-ready files. We will supervise the production process and participate in proofing.
*For government compliance we strongly advise that you retain legal counsel to review your product packaging content. We have a general list of requirements that we pay close attention to, however, a third set of eyes with compliance knowledge is essential.
5/Follow through
Last but not least we package up your dielines and deliver them to you.
We frequently stay on to help manage and develop our client’s visual brand and packaging promotion. We can do this in a number of ways and are always happy to figure what the best fit would be for your company.