Another Year On: How Product Packaging Got Better-Looking

Want to know how refined life has become? Look at how the things around you are wrapped.

We hardly need to tell you how much this era judges by looks.

But there is something most of us overlook: the "looking" in this looks-obsessed era mostly happens on screens. Instagram, videos, whatever picture happens to scroll past. Take fashion shows. The street-style shots and runway photos that travel around the world strain to stand out so that you grasp the point at a glance. Stand next to the real thing, though, and it feels nothing like the picture.

Packaging is the one exception. Design firms will tell you, with a straight face, that packaging is a medium through which a brand tells customers its story and can even start a conversation with them. Put more plainly: whenever you need to "use" something, you cannot avoid its packaging. (The smartest packaging in the world may be the banana's peel, yet someone has still designed a pointless box for bananas.) We see a thing, pick it up, pass it by or click on its picture, then feel it in our hands, open it and use it. We go through this countless times a day.

Whatever holds your interest has to appeal both on the screen and in the flesh. We would go further: a market is only truly competitive when the packaging of everyday goods shows some creativity. And the way packaging in a market changes over time often reflects how people there approach life.

Take the simplest example. Haven't you noticed more and more kraft paper around you? More candy colors? More handwritten lettering?

Brigitte Evard, co-founder of the Pentawards, the international packaging design awards, argues that packaging design is a strict and difficult discipline: it must follow the rules of the market while keeping costs under control and raising profits.

Founded in 2007, the awards honor outstanding packaging and design from around the world, covering food, drinks, luxury goods and other markets. The 2015 Pentawards winners were announced not long ago. Looking over the designs the awards have picked in the past two years, we noticed some interesting trends.

Uneven handwritten lettering, warm and friendly, all to seem more "sincere"

As consumers grow savvier and pickier, winning their trust gets harder. Brands and designers have responded by making packaging show that a product is sincere, so that people feel it is not only "the real thing" but also "made with care." So more and more packaging carries uneven handwritten lettering or loose doodles that look drawn in a single stroke, and uses more natural materials. Brands go to great lengths to show authenticity and craftsmanship, to stress the personality and warmth of the people behind the product, and so to build an emotional bond with consumers.

Gino's Garden, a Lebanese organic olive oil brand, sells its oil in two tilted ceramic bottles. Each bottle is shaped like a lopsided olive, the colors of the two styles match the handwritten "Gino's Garden" lettering, and the bottles can only ever stand at a slant. The set looks plain and unadorned, yet it tells customers clearly that the oil has not been artificially processed, only made honestly by hand.

Gino's Garden olive oil packaging

The Taiwanese drinks brand E-Joy does something similar. The names on its red bean water, job's tears water, red date water and other drinks are all handwritten. Almost no two people write alike, so handwritten lettering emphasizes a product's personality and makes the brand easy to recognize, as if each bottle had a one-of-a-kind story behind it.

E-Joy's drink packaging

Simple and direct: "less is more" rules

Brands that choose this style have read their customers well: people do not want to drown in cluttered information, and they are tired of fussy, pointless decoration. A simple form shows taste, and it conveys the core of the brand, what it is really selling, directly and effectively. To draw a finer line, such packaging may be abstract minimalism with a high-tech feel, or a softer design that quietly signals refinement or a particular market position.

Studio Nendo designed the packaging for a coffee-flavored beer made jointly by the Japanese coffee brand Anchor Coffee and the Sekinoichi brewery. It kept the brewery's original bottle shape and only added specially designed stickers. Gold stickers trace the outline of a coffee bean, and every one was applied by hand. The design is simple and practical and highlights what makes the beer special: the rich aroma of coffee meeting the crispness of beer.

Coffee-flavored beer, its bottle covered in gold coffee-bean stickers

Babee honey works the same way. The glass jar carries no product text at all, yet anyone with a little common sense knows at a glance that it holds honey. A few black horizontal stripes turn it into a "bee": the black lid is the head, the label is the wings, and the round jar is the body. The method is blunt, but the result is cute and endearing.

Babee honey packaging, like a little bee

Everyone loves art and illustration. Are shops turning into art museums?

Many artists tell stories through images, and pictures on packaging are a good way for a brand to tell its own. Simple or realistic pictures show accurately what a product does and how to use it; more imaginative, artistic ones make a product attractive or stir a particular feeling in customers. That is the magic of art.

The packaging that the design studio Horse created for Nongfu Spring won this year's Pentawards prize for best beverage packaging. Its colors and shape are simple and refined, but the illustrations on the bottle add a great deal too. Nongfu Spring's water comes from the Changbai Mountain region, and the packaging shows the area's natural landscape through Siberian tigers, Chinese mergansers, deer and plants such as the Korean pine.

Mineral water packaging designed by Horse for Nongfu Spring

Chocolate brands are especially fond of using paintings as packaging. We have written before about the Austrian brand Zotter Chocolate, which has long worked only with the Austrian artist Andreas H. Gratze. His packaging designs have a strong personal style, which has also made Zotter's products highly recognizable in Austria.

The Dutch chocolate brand Van der Burgh Chocolaad Jheronimus covers its packaging with paintings by the Dutch surrealist Hieronymus Bosch, whose style is singular and strange, yet whose imagination wins you over. With packaging like this, the shop really does become an art museum.

Bosch's paintings on chocolate packaging

The French chocolate brand Le chocolat des Français takes a different approach: fresh, friendly line drawings, while the red, white and blue palette and motifs such as the Eiffel Tower tell you plainly that this is France, this is Paris.

Le Chocolat des Français packaging has a French flavor

The wild imagination of packaging design is a bottomless pit of fun

Packaging design is clearly getting more fun. That is less because people have grown more creative than because designers and brands have grown more open and more willing to show imagination and humor. After all, humor sells! Subtle humor makes people smile, catches their eye and builds a good brand image, and a playful design delights customers before they have even used the product.

Take the Russian household equipment brand Ingro: its packaging is colorful and fun, yet what it sells is pumps. The design firm Otvetdesign invented a cast of friendly neighbors for its customers: a bossy woman, a goofy young man, a muscle-bound strongman, a balding middle-aged man with slicked-down hair. They all have one thing in common: they urgently need a pump! A product that always looks dull and never gets careful packaging has become funny and appealing.

Boring-looking equipment now comes in playful packaging

Russians do this even with fresh food. This is a line of fresh pork from the food brand "Damn Tasty." Clear plastic wrap is combined with paper packaging, and the brand's mascot (a demon that often appears in Russian folklore) is combined with the pig and its various cuts. We do not quite understand the story behind it, but we have to admit it catches the eye.

Damn Tasty: the packaging matches the brand

"Fun" also shows in how brands talk to customers through packaging. Bottles from the drinks brand Purearth carry many small tags with thoughtful messages, some of them playful puns on the drink's flavor. It looks rather corny, but this simple conversation is exactly what makes buying and drinking the product more enjoyable.

Purearth bottles carry many small tags that talk to customers

If you have a series of products, you had better have a series of packaging

Packaging design is part of the overall marketing strategy, and designing for a product line differs from designing for a single product: each item has its own character while keeping a consistent brand identity. A strong product series makes promotion more powerful and strengthens the brand image. That is why more and more brands are working hard on "series," with one style running through the whole line and differences in detail that go well beyond a change of color.

The pasta brand the Geometry of Pasta sells a huge range: the pasta alone reportedly comes in 300 different shapes, and the brand also makes sauces in many flavors. With that variety, and the brand's own idea of "the geometry of pasta," in mind, the British design firm Heredesign created a packaging series that is rich in variety and true to the theme.

To keep customers' attention on the patterns, every package uses just two colors, black and white. The pattern on each box is a graphic rendering of the real shape of the pasta inside, and a small clear window in the middle of the box lets you compare the two-dimensional version with the three-dimensional one.

"The geometry of pasta"

Heredesign also designed a companion recipe book that explores the origins of these pasta shapes and the stories behind them. It helped the brand present pasta as something refined, learned and worth studying in depth.

The recipe book, in a highly consistent brand style

Strong colors, strong contrast, strong geometric patterns

We have noticed some design details spreading widely, to the point where they have become a style of their own. As mentioned earlier, many packages are simple yet manage both to catch the eye and to convey the brand and its message directly. One good way to build on that idea is to use geometric patterns in strong colors. Geometric shapes have simple outlines everyone knows, yet they are highly abstract, and combining different colors and shapes yields endless new patterns.

The Marshmallowist is a handmade marshmallow brand. Its founders point out that marshmallows are usually dropped into hot chocolate or eaten alongside other sweets, as a garnish or an extra. But a marshmallow is a great sweet in its own right, so why not make that stand out?

So the packaging uses bright, clashing colors, each matched to a flavor such as raspberry, passion fruit or blueberry. The large blocks of color also differ in shape: you can spot trapezoids, triangles, hexagons and other geometric forms. As with the pasta boxes, a clear panel lets you see the marshmallows inside. The design is simple and clear, and it keeps marshmallow packaging from being merely childish and cute.

Marshmallows that are no longer "childish"

Another example is the German wine brand Motif Wine, which has tried out a series of combinations of geometry and color, something like a modern artist of wine-bottle packaging.

Motif Wine

White backgrounds, black backgrounds, or black against white

Another camp holds that, if you want to show personality, pure white and pure black matter too. They are the ultimate expressions of "minimalism" and "clarity." Plain white or black backgrounds make customers read the information on a package more carefully, and when the two extremes meet, the sharp contrast creates a strong visual effect on its own.

The fruit-and-grain bars from the Greek snack brand GAEA are both distinctive and cute. Ordinary cereal bar wrappers usually carry pictures of the ingredients plus product information. Because a single bar is small, the whole design easily looks cluttered, and sometimes even the brand name gets lost among the showy raisins, almonds and walnuts.

GAEA's bars neatly avoid this. On a white background, each wrapper carries a single one-color image: the fruit of that flavor, and only its top half, like a little hat. It is not an elaborate design, but when you come across it in person, it leaves a deep impression.

GAEA fruit-and-grain bars in different flavors

Looks matter, but a distinctive shape should also make things easier to use

When choosing the form or shape of packaging, more and more designers think not only about the brand's story (how to make people remember it easily) but also about how to make the product more efficient to use and less of a burden for customers. After all, what sets a product apart from its rivals is not only its looks but also what it actually does, and the same holds for packaging.

Take the takeaway packaging of the Japanese-style ramen chain Wagamama, which we reported on a few days ago. In looks, it carries on the style of the restaurant's tableware: bold and simple. Small functional touches make the whole takeaway meal more thoughtful and comfortable.

The plastic takeaway bowls copy the round black bowls used in the restaurants and can be stacked. The set comes in a cardboard sleeve with a slot inside for wooden chopsticks, and the takeaway menu is printed on top of the sleeve in red on white, set off against the black bowls. Printing the menu on the sleeve is more convenient and saves the step of slipping a separate paper menu into each order before it goes to the customer.

Wagamama's takeaway packaging, both good-looking and practical

Wagamama's takeaway box is clever in its details. A recent Marc Jacobs cosmetics line, meanwhile, has won praise for the sheer simplicity of its form. The surfaces have a smooth, sleek metallic finish, and the slightly chubby lip pencil looks cute and feels good in the hand.

Marc Jacobs cosmetics line

In an age when everyone wants to get back to nature and simplicity, kraft paper has its place

Over the past two or three years, kraft paper has been everywhere. Technically, it is flexible and tough and can be recycled, which makes it a very green packaging material. Food brands especially love kraft paper, or paper with a kraft texture. It does not tear easily, and it hints that the product is natural and unpretentious and that the company has a "sense of responsibility for the environment."

As more people embrace "green, healthy, natural" values, mid-to-high-end brands are changing their packaging strategies and turning to more natural, pared-back designs, and kraft paper is a good choice.

What you might not expect is that even a yo-yo maker would take kraft paper packaging seriously. The Sling-Slang YOYO kit from the product design studio TAIT Design Co. is a cardboard box holding colored string and a grooved axle for customers to assemble themselves. The pattern on the front makes it easy to guess there is a yo-yo inside, and when you open it, you also find hand-drawn instructions. A handmade, nostalgic childhood toy could hardly be better suited to kraft paper, a material both natural and retro.

The yo-yo kit's box (left) and the finished yo-yo

The yo-yo kit

QDaily once ran a piece on chocolate packaging design (you can find it under further reading at the end of this article), and a reader called "Duanmaoyi" commented that for many snacks, the gap in taste between Chinese and foreign brands is far smaller than the gap in packaging. We agree; many companies may be losing out on looks. To return to where we started: if this era judges so much by looks, shouldn't everyone put a little more effort into "surface work"?

Image sources: Marios Karystios, motif-wine, lechocolatdesfrancais, e-joy, otvetdesign, goldendrum, afterhouse, heredesign, mousegraphic, establishednyc, taitdesignco, dezeen, designweek, lovelypackage