DS1 Packaging design

12/4/17 - Week 3
DST60103, Yip Jinchi
Design Studies I: Communication Theory
Packaging design

Lecture & Exercise Brief

In this exercise, we are tasked with creating a packaging design for the favorite food of our partner. The design would have to include elements that reflected the personality of the partner, as well as look attractive enough to actually be used for commercial purposes.

Initial conception

Because my partner's favorite food was mutton flavored biryani, my packaging design would be centered around biryani. I decided to go for a microwaveable pot packaging design, since I thought that would be the most obvious way to sell processed biryani as a commercial product. I had an interview with my partner before I began drawing up concepts to get a general feel of her personality and character, which I can then communicate in the packaging design. 

My partner is a cheerful person, she's also a gamer and plays mainly League of Legends, her favorite color is blue and enjoys EDM music.

My first challenge was to come up with a way to incorporate all these different things onto a single visual piece of work. 

Design process

To start off, I began by looking for the actual object that was supposed to contain the biryani. I found a plastic Tupperware pot that seemed to do the trick. The pot was roughly square in shape, and the packaging for it was essentially a card sleeve that fitted over the entire thing. The lid was where the main visual graphic of the packaging design would be, so I decided to follow suit. I created a net for the packaging design sleeve in Illustrator using the basic primitive shape tools.

Figure 1. The net for the packaging sleeve. The bottom sections are to be affixed together.

With the net done, I began coming up with concept sketches for how the actual design looks like. Because the biryani was the product being advertised, it obviously had to the main focus of the packaging. As such, I gave it a dominant appearance in the design. 

Figure 2. Initial concepts. I illustrated how the packaging sleeve would work as well as some ideas for how the actual thing would look like.

To make the biryani pot look like it was part of an "established" brand, I also came up with concepts for a brand logo. My partner and I decided to use 'Truly Biryani' as the brand name for both our individual designs. The logo of the brand is a dark-red open rice pot with bright yellow text in front of it. I opted for a fun looking font (Bubble Gum) for the brand to reflect my partner's character.

Figure 3. Evolution of the brand logo design. I also tried experimenting with different colors and fonts. I stuck with dark red for the main pot and bright yellow text for the final design.

I then proceeded to digitize the brand logo in Adobe Illustrator. I used the pen tool and primitive shapes to create the pot & lid, the text tool to create the name, and the slice tool to create a shadow for the pot and lid. I also added rice to the top of the pot to give it a more rounded look. I then finished off the whole thing by adding a stroke around the entire logo.

Figure 4. The digitized brand logo.

With the brand logo done, I finally began work on the actual packaging design itself. I first filled the background layer of the image with yellow. I took an image of a mutton biryani pot I found online, transferred it to Photoshop and cut it out using a masking layer as well as the pen tool. My partner's favorite color was blue, so I gave the pot a blue stroke. I also applied a subtle Surface Blur to the pot to decrease the amount of detail the image had. I then created two large blue-colored boxes, rotated them and placed them behind the biryani pot. 

I added a blue-colored star behind the biryani pot to bring 

My partner's favorite game was League of Legends, so I tried to implement a reference to it in the design. The logo for the game is called Fritz Quadrata, which I used as the main font for all the text in the design. Subtle but noticeable enough if someone who plays the game looks closely at it. The subtext below 'Mutton Biryani' is also a subtle hint to anyone who plays the game, as champions are the characters that the player control. 

Figure 5. First draft for the packaging design.