It’s a part of marketing and advertising that we rarely hear about, read about, or even take the time to think about, but package design is a critical part of how we make purchasing decisions. In today’s cluttered, time-pressed climate, an engaging design has mere seconds to win over customers.
Speaking as a designer, it’s a specialized area for independents and small firms, a discipline that requires custom units or teams within the large agencies. The process for manufacturing and the materials all change so rapidly that to work in packaging, one needs to work almost exclusively in this niche.
Through partner Taschen Publishing, Pentawards — the only worldwide competition dedicated to packaging design in all its forms — has just released The Package Design Book 2. The book features some commentary but mostly photos of the award winners from a variety of categories such as beverages, food, luxury, and body product package designs.
The book features fascinating concepts, from package design for a new luxury ice cream company in California (See cover image above; San Francisco office of Landor takes this prize), to Marc Jacobs “Bang” cologne. In order to capture the look of metal struck by a hammer, the designers created the prototype out of metal, transferred that shape to a computer and reproduced it.
There’s also Gogol, a Russian company that offers an egg inside a container that, once a tab is pulled, releases a chemical reaction that allows the package to actually cook the raw egg in minutes.
In Belgium, Coca-Cola went retro, reproducing a variety of bottles from the early 20th century.
The Package Design Book 2
Hardcover, 9.4 x 10.1 in., 432 pages, $59.99
http://online.wsj.com/search/term.html?KEYWORDS=visualizer
Tags: advertising, branding, customers, design, design agencies, design companies, engaging, graphic design companies, marketing, package design, Package Design Book 2
This entry was posted on Sunday, January 20th, 2013 at 12:49 pm and is filed under Advertising, Brand Identity, Customer Experience, Design, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
