How packaging design becomes part of a brand

The first physical contact someone has with a brand can be its packaging. You pick up a box, open the lid, unfold the paper inside. Websites and social feeds are things you look at. Packaging you hold. Treating it as an add-on outside the identity system leaves the brand’s most tangible moment to chance.

Where packaging sits in an identity

Packaging carries the logo, the colours, the type and the graphic language onto an object. But unlike a screen, it also has a material, a print process and a texture. The same red looks one way on glossy board and another on kraft paper. An embossed logo feels different from a flat-printed one.

So packaging design isn’t just a layout job. Colour, paper and print finish are part of the design. That’s why print consultancy, including embossing and letterpress, sits next to packaging in our services.

Thinking in families

Designing one box is easy. What’s hard is getting pieces in different sizes, materials and roles to look like they belong to one family, so that whichever one you pick up first, you know where it came from.

Misho is a good example. It’s a luxury atelier for interior styling and gifting. Its packaging family is made of gift boxes, wrapping paper and labels, and its stationery was printed with embossing and letterpress. Box, tissue and seal speak one language, and the colours take their names from materials: Aegean Soil, Wet Wood, Raw Linen and Sea Salt.

Keeping information and design together

In food, packaging can’t just look good. It has to carry ingredients, nutrition facts, a barcode and legal details as well, and if you add those at the very end, after the design is signed off, it falls apart.

Taze Sepet’s guidelines give packaging its own section. Taze Sepet is an online grocery for natural, regional food. The jar label is a 230 × 70 mm wrap-around, and the layout defines separate areas for the front, an information panel, nutrition facts and the barcode. According to the guidelines, labels are printed in full colour on cream.

Shipping is handled differently. The 40 × 30 × 20 cm shipping box and the packing tape are specified for two-colour printing, in Forest and Fresh Green, on kraft. For the tote bag, the guidelines call for screen printing on natural canvas. The rich colour on the jar and the plain two colours on the box suit two different moments for the same brand.

Questions to ask when you design packaging

• Is it for a shelf, for shipping or for a gift? Each is a different first impression.
• What material will it be printed on, and how will the colours look there?
• Where will the required information go (ingredients, barcode, producer details)?
• When the next product arrives, how will the same system stretch to fit it?
• Does the print technique (embossing, letterpress, screen printing) suit the brand’s character?

The brand in your hands

Packaging is where people hold your brand for longest. Sometimes the box outlives the product. That’s why it should be designed as part of the identity, by the same rules.

Have a look at our packaging design service and the Misho case.