What Do 2016's Most Eye-Catching Package Designs Tell Us About Shoppers?

In an age ruled by looks, even if you have absolute faith in the product itself, it still pays to dress it up a little.

The Pentawards, an international packaging design prize known as the "Oscars" of packaging, turned 10 this year and has just handed out its 2016 awards.

Widely regarded as the most prestigious competition devoted to packaging design anywhere, in recent years it has served as the field's weather vane. For brands, holding on to a customer's loyalty and sense of novelty matters enormously; for designers, simply pandering to customer taste is thankless work — especially in packaging, where the supposed standards of judgment keep shifting with the market.

Looking at the nearly 240 winning entries this year, we tried to pull out the trends and the common threads, to see what new tricks brands of every kind are using to make their products more appealing.

Cold, severe black is in fashion, perhaps to look "high-end"

In a 2013 color survey by the Japanese market research firm Intage, black came first with 48.5%, making it the color that consumers in China, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam and other Asian countries found most "luxurious."

In other words, whenever people think of a "high-end product," they instinctively look for black — as Apple did five or six years later, going back to black for the iPhone 7. Some read it psychologically: most luxury brands pick black and white precisely to dampen the effect color has on your mood, and out of that comes a feeling of refinement. This year, cold, severe black started catching on in packaging too.

POLA, the top-shelf Japanese cosmetics brand known as "the rich woman's favorite," redesigned the packaging of its classic black B.A. brightening morning line this year. Black wraps the product inside and out, a mysterious, stately register that feels more substantial than the gradient colors it used before. One shopper wrote online: "Truly a first-class Japanese luxury brand — the packaging of the black bottle line is a work of art!"

The cider the Japanese drinks brand Chiyonokame launched this year has also put on a black coat. Low-alcohol fruit wines like this usually look fresh and sweet, but this one has dressed itself as an expensive red: a pure black bottle with a black-and-white splashed-ink label, shaking off the look of cheap fruit wine.

Spare, forceful packaging is hard to design, but when it works it stands out

Minimal packaging is hard to do, because it has to carry a brand's image on the fewest possible elements. Its force comes from boiling the brand down to its essence; it aims at one simple, effective exchange with the viewer and leaves the rest to the imagination. It rules out nearly every elaborate technique a designer knows, which is exactly why it tests a designer's skill most.

Take the Domino's pizza delivery box that won this year's top Pentawards honor, the Diamond Award, made by the design firm Jones Knowles Ritchie. JKR's global strategy director Lee Rolston explained: "Domino's is the world's largest pizza chain, but its packaging design had become a medium piled with all kinds of information, with the brand's logo squeezed into a corner. To make Domino's more striking and easier for consumers to recognize and remember, we needed to maximize its character and its appeal."

This time the JKR team threw out the clutter on the old Domino's box and kept only the brand's distinctive two-color mark, blue and red, set against a bold white dot. The team pointed out that most Pentawards Diamond winners since 2007 have followed the modernist master Mies van der Rohe's classic principle: less is more.

Or, in the words of JKR creative director Sean Thomas: "Packaging like this hits you the instant the product reaches the customer's door. Consumers aren't ordering a pizza — they're ordering Domino's."

Another example of that spareness is the lotion bottle for the Japanese skincare brand IPSA. The Japanese studio Communication Design Laboratory gave its self-regulating circulation lotion a bottle that looks exactly like a glass milk bottle; a thin band of pale metallic paper at the neck tells the versions apart — moisturizing-whitening or all-round whitening. Beyond that the bottle carries only IPSA's black logo, with no decoration at all, and you half want to drink it.

Food sellers increasingly let the goods appear in their "true colors," showing what is inside the package in every way they can, to signal freshness and nature

Food packaging used to armor the food completely. Customers could only imagine what was inside from the appetizing diagrams and drawings on the box, usually with a line of small type underneath: "Image for reference only; the actual product prevails."

Now that health and organic have arrived, shoppers care more, and sellers have read that mood. On supermarket and convenience store shelves, more and more goods appear in their "true colors," as if being able to see the food had become a condition for eating it without worry. So sellers have started showing the contents in every way they can, trying to signal freshness and nature.

Take the organic snail packaging for Fereikos, a Greek company that farms snails and processes snail food. The abstract black-and-white spiral of a snail shell on the outside stands for the brand; a cut-out transparent panel in the middle shows the product itself. That helps shoppers identify what they are buying at a glance, and it is also a confident statement about the brand's position as high-end organic food.

Good Hair Day, the pasta packaging by the Russian designer Nikita Konkin that we have written about in detail, plays the same game, but its cleverness lies in using pasta of different shapes and kinds to build a girl's hairdo. The product gets its exposure, and the joke grabs your eye at once. If you are curious, click here ("Pasta as a Girl's Hairdo: This Packaging Comes From a Russian Designer").

Sealed packaging has found more vivid ways to stay close to the product

The outside of an ordinary pack of instant noodles, instant rice or instant vermicelli carries a carefully retouched photograph — steaming noodles or rice, brightly colored vegetables — and it always seems to work on your appetite. Shoppers long ago got used to the gulf between the picture and the contents, and sellers are looking for ways to make this kind of sealed packaging more vivid and closer to what is actually inside.

Stating the facts about the product clearly and visibly matters: the ingredients, the color, the flavor, the use.

The bread bag the Belgian supermarket chain Delhaize designed for its own-label loaves is a good example. To make its own-label food more recognizable, Delhaize brought in the Brussels independent brand design agency Monalisa to design packaging category by category across a range that includes deli items, cheese, biscuits, juice, bread, pastries and pet food. This wholewheat bread bag, which won a Pentawards silver this year, uses illustration to tell the story of growing wheat in brief, aiming for the feeling of a farm delivering straight to the supermarket.

Many Japanese brands bring a certain cuteness to their packaging. Maruju, a dyeing and weaving shop in Nagoya with more than 90 years behind it, brought in designer Hidekazu Hirai of the studio Peace Graphics for this year's Menpu Masda handkerchief line. In cute illustrations he walks through the uses in turn — wiping sweat, wiping tears, dabbing the corners of your mouth after a meal — and even shows how to fold the handkerchief into the breast pocket of a suit jacket. The function comes across simply and with humor.

Being fun still counts — on a crowded shelf it may be the sharpest way to catch your eye

Standing in front of a shelf full of competing products, shoppers who have not already decided on one brand's one item — which is most of them — may pick up anything on the shelf for a look before deciding whether to buy. That is when a playful package matters most; it can be the sharpest tool for stirring curiosity.

Suntory may be a brand more than a century old, but its packaging and its thinking have stayed fairly avant-garde.

This year Orangina, the French drinks maker Suntory acquired, put out a limited summer juice that caught everyone off guard. A mashup of denim hot pants and a bikini is worn on the bottle — sexy in the extreme, and holding one makes you want to head straight for the water. A whole bottle of summer beach.

Another Orangina juice package plays with peeling fruit. Starting at the mouth of the bottle, you tear the wrapper away along a dotted line, ring by ring, and what comes off looks like peel shaved with a fruit knife, until the orange juice shows its face.

Illustration is especially handy: it carries the brand's image and it is easy to keep fresh

Back when last year's Pentawards were announced, we argued that illustration on a package is a good way for a brand to tell its own story. In the past, the only illustrators who got their names onto a product worked for books and newspapers; they rarely touched packaging. Now brands work with illustrators all the time, and illustration has become the best way for many sellers to spell out a package's personality and taste — it carries the brand's image and it is easy to keep fresh.

PLAN N to the Nth Power is a plant-protein grain drink line Uni-President launched last year, built mainly on nuts, fruit and vegetables, and grains. The flavor names are blunt to the point of crude — "Because of the Stomach," "Detonate the Metabolism," "Seriously Durian-Mango" — and the illustration on the lower half of the bottle is just as direct, laying the nuts, fruit and vegetables, and grains out on the package naked. The point is to feel close to the drinker, and to get younger buyers talking and sharing.

The illustrated packaging for Tawasap, an Ecuadorian headscarf brand, also stands out. Feathers were once an ornament for Native American men, worn proudly on a warrior's head as a sign of courage, wisdom and pride. Ecuadorians no longer wear feather headdresses, but headscarves in the wild style of the old tribes have caught on. To match Tawasap's wild register, the Ecuadorian illustrator Viscera Vicarious drew figures from Native American tribes for the brand, with feathers, ram's horns and hide all appearing in their headgear — a good fit for the scarves themselves.

Flat logos are still in fashion

People have been shouting about flat design for years and it has lost none of its force; even Instagram, which stuck to a retro, arty look for a long time, came over to that side this year. In packaging, flat design took over long ago. We have reported on the global confectioner Hershey's new logo, and on BMW's MINI. Adweek once went through the logos of the top 50 companies and found that 45 of them had gone flat.

This February, to mark its 140th anniversary, Budweiser rolled out a new package design, and the most striking part of it was a logo turned flat. The design team kept the brand's red bowtie and its script and stripped out the other lines; a navy mark was worked into Budweiser's aluminum cans and bottles, with a silver badge added. It is the largest change since Budweiser's first logo appeared in 1936.

Joining the flat-design ranks also lets Budweiser's image travel better across the many screens and platforms ahead. The firm that did the work, JKR, is the same one behind this year's Diamond Award-winning Domino's box.

Art moves in: Pop Art halftones, and geometry colliding with color

The beauty business has long made limited editions with artists. What is inside is nothing more than the hand cream, perfume, makeup or cleansing oil you can buy all year round, but an artistic package often turns into a neat sales trick, and Shu Uemura, Kiehl's and Givenchy have all tried it around holidays large and small.

Now bringing art into packaging has become routine, and it has spread into food.

Look at the brown sugar nut packaging from Hong Kong's Tiger Balm, which renders peanuts, walnuts, almonds and cashews as halftone Pop Art. For a traditional everyday snack that is a bold break, and the designer calls it both a tribute to the Pop Art master Roy Lichtenstein and a distinctive way to convey the product's idea.

Burger King's latest packaging sets geometry against color. The job went to the well-known creative agency Turner Duckworth Design. Everything looks hand-printed and the logo has become a stamp; the brown, yellow, green and red of the new packaging stand for Burger King's standard flame-grilled beef patty, cheese, lettuce and ketchup. A color has been added, but with the brightness dialed down and kraft paper behind it, the result stays simple and consistent, with a slightly retro feel.

Packaging can also be a way to ride the news

JKR, the design firm we keep coming back to, did well at this year's Pentawards. Besides the new Domino's box and Budweiser's rebrand, two limited-edition beer packages it designed were talked about for a while.

Budweiser has always pushed hard on marketing in summer, the peak season for beer. This year, chasing the U.S. presidential election, it made "America Is in Your Hands" its summer theme. Budweiser said the theme was meant to encourage drinkers to "embrace the optimism upon which this country was founded." Of the two limited editions it put out between last year and this, one took the Statue of Liberty as its theme; the other simply swapped the brand name "Budweiser" for "America", changed the logo from "AB" to "US," and replaced the slogan "King of Beers" with the motto on the Great Seal of the United States, "E Pluribus Unum."

The other brand that loves a bandwagon is Burger King. Last Halloween it had Turner Duckworth create a set of Halloween Whopper packaging. The main attraction of that "Halloween Whopper" was two black baked buns coated in black pepper beef sauce, and the wrapper used anthropomorphic designs: jack-o'-lanterns, goblins and ghouls, plus masks and crowns. It reportedly sold like mad on the day.

Too many brands now labor over packaging. Some, like Nongfu Spring, hire a foreign designer and spend two and a half years from taking the job to the final prototype — earnest work. Others, like Burger King, borrow the momentum of the Halloween season for a quick, witty flash of marketing.

In an age ruled by looks, even if you have absolute faith in the product itself, it still pays to put some thought into dressing it up.

Image source: the Pentawards website