Finalising Packaging Design

To finalise the packaging design, I made sure that all colours were appropriate to the flavours and to the original designs. The colours have to be right to make sure that the type is still visible across each design without having to change the type colour (Except in the instance of the light colours White, Butterscotch and Caramel which need dark type to stand out).

When colouring the final designs, Will noticed that I had been using a different gold colour as him across the designs, so we checked the difference in colour to decide which we should go for.
This shows my design and then my design with Will's gold colour.

You can see that the gold that Will has been using is much yellower in tint whereas mine is far duller and greyer. I actually prefer my golden colour for many of the designs, but also the other gold works across many of the packaging designs.

My gold:

Compared to new gold:

There is not too much difference, but we decided to go for the brighter/yellower gold to use in the finals.

The lighter gold parts of the designs will be foil blocked to make them stand out in the packaging and the rest of the type will just be a golden ink. 

The leaf pattern will be spot varnished which will make it stand out from the background colour but not make it impose on the rest of the design. 

This is a really quick mock up test to try and simulate a spot varnish effect.

Packaging - Promoting the event

We decided that there should be some way to promote the event on the packaging. Our idea was to use the classic diagonal corner separated for promotional information about the event as it is recognised and it is as unobtrusive on the rest of the packaging as possible.

There would probably some kind of simple text with a representation or simple symbol of the event featured in the corner.





When trying out this idea we  quickly realised that there is very little space for any promotion on the packaging and so some aspects had to be moved about.

This was my first attempt at adding the corner. As you can see it nearly works but leaves only a very small space for promoting and causes the other aspects of the packaging to move around and become asymmetrical and unaligned. I decided that this didn't work and moved on to try somewhere else. 

I tried to do the same thing in the top right corner by it worked out even less successfully, this time having even less space to work with for promoting.

After talking about it we decided to scrap this idea and instead work with promoting the event in store not on the bar. We came up with the idea of using the shelves and the space around them to promote G&B. 

YCN - Packaging Redesign Redesign

Aside from sorting out the colours of the packaging, we also wanted to make the type look a bit more premium and expensive, similar to the pre-existing G&B colours of gold foil blocking and a different gold ink.

To start with I experimented in just changing certain parts of the design to gold to make them stand out separately from the rest.

I think that this works to a degree and does work as a concept, but the rest of the type is far too dark and jars against the gold leaves. 

So instead I decided to colour all the type in a couple of different shades of gold.
I think this works a lot better as the two colours compliment each other much more but the colours still need some tweaking of contrast to make them stand out more against dark backgrounds etc.
I will work with using the gold colours across the range of packaging.

Packaging - Colour Variations

I used the template of the packaging and changed around the colours and information on each to fit a different flavour of chocolate bar.

I think the colours work as a set although the type colour needs to be sorted to fit the brand more as it looks quite brash at the moment. And I still think the "Celebrating 20 years" bit needs some work. 

Lets see what people say in the crit. 

Pattern design

lolTo make the packaging more obviously different than usual I came up with this idea for a pattern that can be used across each design and makes the packaging more interesting in a kind of subtle way.

I started with this design as an idea, but the shape of the leaves makes them difficult to tessellate and limits the kind of patterns that can be made.

This pattern is far too dense to be used in a subtle way and becomes a bit too much of a focal point of the packaging.

To make the design less dense but still make it work well as a pattern I created this test design. It flows a lot more and leaves a lot of space but is still recognisable as the G&B leaf so I think it works well in context.

I copied and pasted the design over and tweaked it to make sure it all repeated properly and layered it underneath the rough layout design.

I then changed the opacity of the leaves pattern to make it less obtrusive and not take away from the design. I think this works quite nicely as a pattern that shows obviously that the packaging has changed and suggests that there is something better about the brand or will at least entice interest. I also think it fits quite well with the premium look and feel of the brand and don't think it takes away from what the company represents. 

I also tried to take the pattern design further by introducing more leaf symbols and experimenting with opacity and the overprint look. 

The result is much less successful and looks too busy as well as changing the feel of the brand further away from the premium look of the original design. 

I decided to keep the simpler leaf pattern design to use in the exclusive packaging. 

Redesigning the packaging.

As part of my responsibilities for the YCN brief I had to look at trying to redesign the packaging and maybe edit part of the branding to represent the event/ 20 years longevity of the brand.
To start this I looked at an original example of the packaging and thought about what parts worked and what parts were necessary to keep and what parts could potentially be changed.

This is where the first problems came when I realised that the packaging is already very professionally designed and is pretty difficult to improve on. It has just enough information to describe the chocolate bar in detail and still ensure that the type doesn't over fill the design.

It also retains the premium, upmarket quality that the brand represents and tries to communicate as well as representing and appealing to the defined target audience well. Each flavour of the chocolate has a different colour to represent the flavour, some of which work better than others which is one thing that probably could be improved on. I will also need to come up with some way to represent the idea of the 20 year longevity and maybe some minimal promotion of the event.

To start designing I first mocked up a quick similar design to the original packaging and played around with a few elements.

I have decided to carry on using the original Green & Blacks logo, after all they are not asking for a product rebrand, just a marketing campaign. Someone probably got paid a lot of money to come up with the logo and I don't see any point in messing around with it.

I have simplified the design slightly by using lines similar to those in the logo instead of actual blocks of separated colour.
One idea at this point was to go down the route of taking the concept back to basics and show exactly where the brand came from, using the original 70% cocoa bar as the basis of the campaign and show the fairtrade and organic aspects of it by using simplified design.

The other route would be to keep with the premium feel of the brand and just redesign it simply to represent the 20 years of chocolate making.

I first tried out this idea of moving around the leaf symbol to represent the G&B brand, using guides to make sure everything was aligned.

I decided that this design was too simple and didn't really do anything for the packaging redesign. It needs something a bit more to help represent the difference between this packaging and the previous one.

Retaking photos

One comment from the final crit was that my photographs looked a bit weird on the page because something happened in photoshop and it couldn't be seen until printing so I have had to retake the photos for the final board. Here I took a few photos from different angles and set them up in a contact sheet to see which ones had the best angles and no strange blurs or marks on the photos. 

Then I picked the 2 which I thought were the best to replace the two main photographs on the first board which are shown below. 

After picking the best photos I used Photoshop to get rid of any weird marks and things like the sides of the paper in the bottom picture and I increased the brightness and contrast a bit to make the images pop from the background better. 

Now these images should work a lot better in the final boards and produce a smoother look to the first board. 

Photographing first product

These are my first attempts at photographing my printed and constructed packaging. I am not usually very good at photographing my products so in this instance I put in a bit more effort and tried to create really nice crisp high contrast photographs by using a light box to create loads of light for the photos. 

I think these photographs look pretty good in comparison to the kind that I would usually do for my briefs last year so it is definitely a step in the right direction. 

Aside from the better quality photographs I also put a lot more effort in to the crafting of the packaging. Anyone who has ever seen me try to construct something would know that it is a big weak point in the finishing of my work so in this case I put in extra effort to make sure I didn't needlessly mark the card or cut it wrong or get glue everywhere. I used double sided tape as a clean adhesive and made sure the surface that I was working on was always clean and I made sure that the stock didn't split when folded. 

All in all I think it paid off quite well and in terms of finished quality it is very good by my standards. 

Final Nets

Here are all of the final net designs. They are quite self explanatory. In industry they will printed exactly like this, die cut and then shipped to the airlines or to the food manufacturers to be easily assembled and put in to use. 

This shows the back of the nets. I didn't want the inside of the boxes to be plain white so I made them plain blue instead. It is the same Pantone colour as on the front of the nets. 

It also covers the majority of the back of the A2 sheet which means that any miss-alignment in printing both sides won't affect the end result. It is basically using a big bleed.