Package design is where creativity meets problem-solving. To make an eye-catching package, you must apply your artistic skills to strict size and shape requirements. Striking the right balance can be tricky, but learning to successfully design packages can help you develop a creative resourcefulness for tackling projects across the larger design industry.
Students studying graphic design at Full Sail University take a Packaging & Prototypes course that covers the basics of package design, plus creative strategies and technical skills. Students create original package designs, complete with prototypes, while using the same workflows they can expect in the professional design world.
The course’s instructor, Suzy Johnson, has years of design experience, including a stint prototyping custom packaging for Dixon Ticonderoga.
Suzy sat down with us to share her top five tips for great packaging design, as well as how she’s helping her students learn those skills with hands-on projects.
1. Conduct Hands-On Research
You already have plenty of practice in the first step of successful package design: going shopping. Hitting the aisles of your local grocery store and seeing physical examples of package design, instead of relying on online research or photographs, can help take your designs from concept to container.
In Suzy’s class at Full Sail, she encourages her students to go beyond the classroom and find packaging examples they can hold in their hands.
“All of us have this real-world, practical, everyday experience walking down the shopping aisles and picking up what we’re considering buying and flipping over the package,” Suzy says. “The research in this class is mostly drawn from those experiences, so I try to motivate the students to get out there and physically look at packaging.”
Observing package design on store shelves will also show you which design elements stand out in the real world, and you’ll see how competitors are designing their packages.
2. Know Your Format
An arresting design is essential when you’re trying to grab consumers’ attention, but the layout, colors, and typography you’ve worked so hard on won’t matter if your design is at odds with the package’s format. Adjusting the size, ratios, and shape of your design to fit your format gives shoppers the most important information about a product at a glance.
“For example, if a label is going around a cylinder or some type of rounded bottle shape or rounded container shape, you only see a certain amount of it from the front of the package design, which is essentially what competes on the shelf. Even though your label template may be so wide by so high, you have to know what is going to be visible from the front of the package within those parameters,” Suzy explains.
3. Understand the Production Process
The package design process involves multiple phases and a variety of people, and understanding it from start to finish leads to more effective designs. When Suzy is teaching, she tells her students what they can expect when they’re designing packages in the real world.
“Knowing the process of how a piece of board paper becomes a box or how your label gets applied is really important in making sure that your package design is produced correctly, and also looks good,” she says. “You are going to be in connection with a vendor or manufacturer that’s going to tell you, ‘Well, these are the objects we make. This is the one the client picked out. These are the stocks that you can pick. These are the inks. This is how it’s printed.’ There are parties involved that will know a lot more about substrates, print finishes, the production process. You have to know the people that are involved in getting what you want produced.”
4. Strategize
Combining your research, your knowledge of packaging formats, and your familiarity with the production process will help you develop smart strategies to approach your design. Suzy has created hands-on projects for her Packaging & Prototypes students that encourage them to strategize in unique ways.
“They have a project where they have to create a nutritional supplement that gives the user temporary superpowers. I give them a vehicle of delivery, like a patch or a powder, then they do a series of single-use pouches or single-use sale items. They analyze what works and what doesn’t for supplement packaging they see in stores, they look at what competitors are doing, look at layouts,” Suzy says.
“On supplements, there’s a lot of regulated information, and the government requires that it be a certain height and width,” she continues. “So there’s a lot of this practical component to package design that you only get from developing your creative strategies before you start designing.”
5. Make Your Own Prototypes
Creating physical prototypes is essential. By printing out your dieline or label and seeing how they fit on your package, you’ll get a more accurate idea of how your completed design will look. You can also troubleshoot any issues, like a label that’s overlapping important information, before you send your design to the client.
“How are you expected to design something if you can’t turn it over in your hands and understand that format?” Suzy says. “The prototyping is half the process. You need to make sure that everything fits. If you get the design dimensions from the manufacturer and you’re doing some type of custom label, you can’t assume that it’s going to fit the bottle. You’re probably going to test it, print it, prototype it – you’re testing your format and your design on your format.”
According to Suzy, relying solely on your computer to measure and scale your designs can lead to trouble. Colors can look different on your screen than they do on a printed design, and zooming in to focus on small details can alter your perspective.
“I always encourage my students to print out their designs,” she says. “Holding it in your hands is definitely going to teach you a lot more than just making it in pixels.”
